[Serusers] Loadbalancing / high availability

[Michael Shuler]

We use a Foundry ServerIron XL and it seems to work fine.  We do not use SER
as a stateful proxy though.  SER is basically a SIP message load balancer
across our Asterisk boxes.

----------------------------------------

Michael Shuler, C.E.O.
BitWise Communications, Inc. (CLEC) And BitWise Systems, Inc. (ISP)
682 High Point Lane
East Peoria, IL 61611
Office: (217) 585-0357
Cell: (309) 657-6365
Fax: (309) 213-3500
E-Mail: mike at bwsys.net
Customer Service: (877) 976-0711 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: serusers-bounces at lists.iptel.org 
> [mailto:serusers-bounces at lists.iptel.org] On Behalf Of Matt Schulte
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 7:42 AM
> To: serusers at lists.iptel.org
> Subject: RE: [Serusers] Loadbalancing / high availability
> 
> 
> 
> I'm curious what brand load balancer you would use, would it be IP
> based. We tried out a Cisco SLB and had no luck, mainly 
> because it would
> NAT to the servers (more trouble than it's worth?). We were 
> thinking of
> using a heartbeat type failover, similar to what you would do 
> for MySQL:
> 
> http://linux-ha.org/download/
> 
> Has anyone tried this method? We're more concerned about the high
> availability than anything.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: E. Versaevel [mailto:erik at infopact.nl] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 7:24 AM
> To: serusers at lists.iptel.org
> Subject: [Serusers] Loadbalancing / high availability
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I was wondering if it is necessary for a SIP packet from a 
> specific call
> to always go through the same server?
> 
> For instance, if you have a load balancer distributing requests over a
> few servers, it is possible that an INVITE ends up on 1 
> server while the
> following INVITE with the credentials ends up on another, 
> would this be
> a problem (ie, break the authorization) or should you use a SIP aware
> loadbalancer for this (who looks at the callid for example)? Assuming
> the ser servers are setup to use the same userdatabase (and 
> t_replicate
> to eachother) the picture would be something like this:
> 
> 			 |
> 		  --------------
> 	        |loadbalancer|
> 		  --------------
> 	             |
> 	             |
> 	    --------------------
> 	    |	       |         |
> 	-------   -------   -------
> 	|     |   |     |   |     |
> 	| ser1|   | ser2|   | ser3|
> 	|     |   |     |   |     |   
> 	-------   -------   -------
> 
> If you setup the servers with the same IP as the load 
> balancer and stop
> them from replying to ARP requests for that IP, replying back 
> thru a NAT
> should not be a problem.
> 
> Just thinking out loud, I could use SER for the load balancing and
> t_relay the packets, however that would require some 
> tampering with the
> VIA records (and I should use a reply to via in that case to the
> original IP the SIP request came from, eg not the load balancer) this
> way outgoing SIP traffic would not have to go thru the ser 
> loadbalancer
> again to get out, hmm, it might even be possible to use a route-record
> header to get the packets back at the correct server...
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> E. Versaevel
> 
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