SBC failover?

[benf]

Hi all, normally we do VPN's to our cloud 3cx appliances especially in multiple locations. I have one client that has 50 phones in one location and 10/10/10 , I thought I would try an SBC for ease of deployment. So my question is if the SBC goes down that whole site is down right? I cant go into 3cx and switch from SBC to STUN or will the phone failover to STUN by itself? I want to use the SBC not because I have any technical challenge, but it seems like an easier way to roll out phones and such. But what would be the point of having a nice cloud service with all the redundancy built in if I rely on one small device (or computer or server or vm or whatever).

 

[cobaltit]

Well unless you have multiple internet connections there you already have a single point of failure. But yes you can have multiple SBCs in a single site and split the phones across them. Then if one fails you can changed them in 3CX to the other one. If you want something automatic you can get creative with clustering, etc. There's some threads on the forums for this but nothing built-in to 3CX at the moment.

 

[benf]

I do have multiple connections and I can do a VPN over both connections. I just kind of 'assumed' that if the SBC was down the phone would check-in directly over STUN . It seems like a reasonable thing I dont know why I thought it would. The SBC doesnt have any 'config' on it right? so I could setup a 2nd SBC and register it and even if it doesnt get 'used' if I needed to switch to it are you saying i could just use the pull down on the 3cx extension and change the SBC? It sounds interesting, but maybe the VPN is better. the client has plenty of bandwidth but the main office handles like 80% of the business internally , last month they were 60k minutes on their bill. and i was just thinking this is an easier setup because it would limit all that inter-office traffic at the main site.

It looks like if the SBC went down maybe I just restart the phone and the other SBC would kick in?

 

[cobaltit]

SBC has a basic config in that it knows where the 3CX instance is and what the tunnel password is. But yes any sort of failover/heartbeat setup keeping the same IP or use internal DNS and multiple SBCs or a cold spare configured on the same IP and boot it up or switching the extension assignment in 3CX from SBC1 to SBC2 and rebooting the phones. Many different ways to accomplish depending on your required level of automation.

 

[benf]

Ok, so if i add a 2nd SBC there would be an option? on the 3cx side? I guess what Im not sure of is I have phone A using SBC B . SBC B dies, and I turn on SBC C , its already configured and 'available' to the 3cx so it would be matter of getting phone A to 'talk' to SBC C. I dont mind the client 'being down' for a few minutes if i had to turn it up, i could use a static IP i suppose and just keep the other one off that sounds like the easiest way.

 

[cobaltit]

The SBC field in the extension provision is just a text box. So you can update the IP and then have the customer reboot the phone and when the phone downloads the new config you'd be all set.