Failover Mode in Cloud Installation

[FredR]

Hello everyone,
i've been struggeling with an issue and hope you got an answer for following question:
How to perform a Failover with the Cloud Installation of 3CX V14? :?:

According the standard installation, the procedure is christal clear: Enable failover, configure restore scheduling, enter remote server IP address and so on.

But how to perform these steps on a cloud installation running with an number of instances?
All i can find is the "Failover mode" Button, right on the Backup / Restore Tab on the Cloud Manager. But no settings for remote server, scheduling...
So is there any ini File or configuration file which shall be edited to enable failover mode?

I already searched through the 3cx documentation, but all i can find is the procedure regarding the standard installation.

Hope you can help me out,
Thanks a lot in advance!

Fred

 

[charles]

Hi There

The failover feature is currently not available. This is something that is being planned for the near future.

 

[FredR]

Allright, thank you for your fast response!
I thought this feature is already implemented, because of the "Failover Mode" Button on the Cloud Manager GUI.

Thanks again!
Fred

 

[kencomp]

Hi Fred/Or 3CX

Did you see if this has been added yet? I know the Failover is available for single instances, but its still just a button for the cloud server instances with no instruction.

Does failover work on the cloud instances?

Thanks

Dan

 

[kencomp]

Anyone available to answer this?

We have 2 cloud servers ready to go, we want to know failover option works?

Thanks

Dan

 

[NickD_3CX]

Currently the failover is not available for the instances on a Virtual PBX installation. You still can have scheduled backups made on the Virtual PBX Server of all instances, but the automation of restoring them on the backup/passive server and the passive servers services starting automatically as is done in the Single Instance is still not there.

A simple way to run scheduled backups of all the instances of a Virtual PBX could be by using something like the following batch file

@echo off

REM Write the path where you want the backups to be backed up in. Don't use a \ at the end of the path
set backup_path=C:\Virtual PBX Backups

set current_datetime=%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%%date:~-4,4%_%time:~-11,2%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%
set full_backup_filename="%backup_path%\vpbx_backup_%current_datetime%.zip"

mkdir "%backup_path%"
"%programfiles%\3CX Phone System\Bin\BulkBackup.exe" backup %full_backup_filename%

This you could then call from a Windows Task Scheduler at any intervals you want. You could even obviously extend the script so that the backups are copied to an off-site server/location.

 

[kencomp]

Do you have any idea failover will be implemented for the Virtual PBX installation? Seems pretty critical for a cloud based platform running multiple instances.

 

[NickD_3CX]

Unfortunately I don't have an ETA for that.

 

[kencomp]

How about the licencing? I restored to another server and it did not a licence anymore as there was no network connection on the other machine. Do we have to add the licence every time we do a restore to a second machine? And does it rip the licence off the original machine if it restores to a machine with an internet connection?

Thanks

 

[NickD_3CX]

The backup does contains the License details, so when you restore it will try to activate. The reason why in your case it did not would possibly because at the time of the restoration it had no network connection, so the activation attempt failed.

As for what happens with the License Key on the main 3CX Server, they will not be ripped out, so if you try to restore a backup on a backup server, then you will end up with the License Key being activate simultaneously on 2 3CX Servers, which is not a good idea.
Generally, I would recommend making sure that the main server is either offline, or the instance that is going to be restored on the backup server is reverted to Free on the main one before restoring.