Hi,
We are a 3CX partner.
I want to know how other people are dealing with business continuity with 3CX in muti-site environments.
At the moment we have a customer that has a fault tolerant set up with two Hyper-V hosts that are running Hyper-V replica between two different sites with different subnets. The idea is that is a server room catches on fire (etc.) the business can failover the servers to the other site. They also have a handful of other sites connected by VPNs. We have various Windows VM guests on the Hyper-V hosts, one of these is a server running 3CX V18 32SC Enterprise on Windows Server 2022. We have never tested failover of this server to the other site because the local IP being in the 3CX config makes this problematic but we figured in the event of a disaster we could probably get 3CX running on the other other site/subnet with a bit of help from support if needed. We recently did a formal test of failover and 3CX was one of the application excluded from the test that needs to be included next time.
So now it is (past) time to upgrade to V20, and whilst we do this we don't really want an application running on prem on domain joined Windows with a load of inbound ports so we have been thinking of moving at least to self-hosted Linux or better still to 3CX hosted. Our problem is how do we do fault tolerance?
Options:-
1. Use 3CX Hosting
If we use 3CX Hosting we can assume (hopefully correctly) that 3CX have made their own arrangements for fault tolerance. However we're then a bit stuck with the SBCs. I think I'm correct in saying that even though there are VPNs between the customer sites there still needs to be an SBC at every site, in fact there needs to be an SBC per subnet? There is a fault tolerant setup for SBC but both SBCs also need to be on the same subnet right? I think this isn't going to work.
2. Host 3CX in Azure
We can get the Linux Azure market place version of 3CX and connect it to the existing VPN with the customers sites. At least 3CX will keep the instance up to date. We'll Assume that Azure has enough fault tolerance if we use GRS etc. No SBCs will be needed, but it's not as good as having 3CX in charge of making it secure.
3. Host 3CX on prem
So we resign ourselves to running 3CX on prem on Hyper-V with Hyper-V replica. We test to see whether we can get failover working after an IP change, preferably with Linux. This should be possible. So what if we have to add a few lines to the Cyber Security form about inbound ports to customer managed servers, it all fine right?
We are a 3CX partner.
I want to know how other people are dealing with business continuity with 3CX in muti-site environments.
At the moment we have a customer that has a fault tolerant set up with two Hyper-V hosts that are running Hyper-V replica between two different sites with different subnets. The idea is that is a server room catches on fire (etc.) the business can failover the servers to the other site. They also have a handful of other sites connected by VPNs. We have various Windows VM guests on the Hyper-V hosts, one of these is a server running 3CX V18 32SC Enterprise on Windows Server 2022. We have never tested failover of this server to the other site because the local IP being in the 3CX config makes this problematic but we figured in the event of a disaster we could probably get 3CX running on the other other site/subnet with a bit of help from support if needed. We recently did a formal test of failover and 3CX was one of the application excluded from the test that needs to be included next time.
So now it is (past) time to upgrade to V20, and whilst we do this we don't really want an application running on prem on domain joined Windows with a load of inbound ports so we have been thinking of moving at least to self-hosted Linux or better still to 3CX hosted. Our problem is how do we do fault tolerance?
Options:-
1. Use 3CX Hosting
If we use 3CX Hosting we can assume (hopefully correctly) that 3CX have made their own arrangements for fault tolerance. However we're then a bit stuck with the SBCs. I think I'm correct in saying that even though there are VPNs between the customer sites there still needs to be an SBC at every site, in fact there needs to be an SBC per subnet? There is a fault tolerant setup for SBC but both SBCs also need to be on the same subnet right? I think this isn't going to work.
2. Host 3CX in Azure
We can get the Linux Azure market place version of 3CX and connect it to the existing VPN with the customers sites. At least 3CX will keep the instance up to date. We'll Assume that Azure has enough fault tolerance if we use GRS etc. No SBCs will be needed, but it's not as good as having 3CX in charge of making it secure.
3. Host 3CX on prem
So we resign ourselves to running 3CX on prem on Hyper-V with Hyper-V replica. We test to see whether we can get failover working after an IP change, preferably with Linux. This should be possible. So what if we have to add a few lines to the Cyber Security form about inbound ports to customer managed servers, it all fine right?
