Upgrading Pro to Enterprise for Failover

[caseyswoods]

I have a 16SC Pro perpetual license that expires in 2 days (Aug 30th). I was about to purchase maintenance for the next year... but now have decided that we want to upgrade to an Enterprise license to take advantage of failover.

Just wondering the best way to go about this? Do I need to buy the license upgrade before it expires in 2 days?

From a technical perspective: We have our current Windows 3CX server running on AWS EC2 in Portland. Backups are being made to Google drive. I'm planning on installing our failover server on AWS EC2 in Canada. All of our 3CX clients are in various locations around the web. I've read through the 3CX failover docs online. I assume that I'll be able to upgrade the license on the current server, install the second server and configure it for failover without too much difficulty? This isn't a "weird" configuration?

 

[sip.bg]

To upgrade license before renewing maintenance, you still need to pay partial maintenance for the existing size of the license. Then you need to buy maintenance for the upgraded one.
The other option is first to renew maintenance and then to purchase upgrade.
Two options should be the same price at the expiry of current maintenance moment, but may differ.
If you send a PM with your license key, I could check it for you which option to choose. After 30th of August you will have only the option of renewing maintenance first and then purchasing the upgrade.

I can't advise you how to make your failover configuration in best way and whether you can do it the way you want -- in two distinct locations, unless there is a VPN between them. You need to control probably DNS server for your FQDN. How your provider will route traffic to one or another server, if they have different public addresses. The only way is to have one of the servers registering to provider, otherwise you need to have a custom configuration with provider if sending invites to primary server is not responding, to resend invites to backup server. For outgoing calls you need to have both addresses authenticated.

 

[Agathocles Prodromou]

I have a 16SC Pro perpetual license that expires in 2 days (Aug 30th). I was about to purchase maintenance for the next year... but now have decided that we want to upgrade to an Enterprise license to take advantage of failover.

Just wondering the best way to go about this? Do I need to buy the license upgrade before it expires in 2 days?

For questions regarding licensing I would suggest contacting 3CX Sales or your 3CX Reseller.

 

[eddv123]

A quick note on the techie side, firstly here is the v15 guide for Enterprise fail-over:
https://www.3cx.com/docs/failover/

We had fail-over working successfully in v14 (when it was a single licence fail-over) but have not yet attempted this in v15, although now they have the single Enterprise licence I expect this process to be simplified. However if i run through what we did it might give you some ideas:

Map a network drive/make a share between the two machines running both your PBX's.

Have your 2 3CX phone systems up and running with the backups setup as per documentation provided. And both using split DNS.

We used our own SSL certificate and FQDN hosted in Google cloud, with domains and appropriate public IP's configured for auto-failover in the cloud.

2 Scripts as per the guide (I believe examples are now provided). These were to cover the fail-over process, where you can have a fail back script if desired also, however normally this would not be used as you would likely want to fail back manually at a suitable time (out of office hours).

N.B user rights on both machines will need to be kept a close eye on – for example enable the administrator account on the active server (by default this is disabled) and also set a password: this is to enable the passive server to login remotely to manage the 3CX services (start/shutdown in the script).