[OpenSER-Users] Bigger OpenSER installation (2-5 Mio subs) and High Availability

[Henning Westerholt]

On Saturday 26 April 2008, Peter P GMX wrote:
> I have done a project for a SIP provider who is rapidly growing.
> Designed as a SBC for about 50.000 subscribers at first, I setup a
> system with a high availability cluster (HA/DRBD) on 2 servers which had
> one single database on the DRBD volume. Failover works like a charm with
> only very limited downtime.
> Now we have to consider to scale the system to about 2-5 Mio subs, so I
> have to challenge with some things I cannot oversee at the moment.

Hi Peter,

there of course many possibilities for the setup of such a installation.. :-)

> My question is: How do you deal with big installations?
> - how do you load balance the openser? Is it advisable put put some
> dedicated SIP hardware in front for load balancing? Or is the dispatcher
> module on a seperate machine sufficiant (again HA-issue)?

You could use some dedicated load-balancer with carrierroute (or dispatcher) 
in front of your proxies and registrars. Its not sufficient to use just one 
machine, because of high-availability.

> - we have a portion of calls who have to go through mediaproxy (How do
> you load balance this?)

If you could detect the portion of calls on your balancer, then just balance 
them to some proxy with a dedicated mediaproxy box.

> - Do you face database issues? We think about setting up a database on 2
> seperate servers. Is MySQL ok for this or do you use other DBMS?
> - Form your exoperience: Are there other things I have to consider?

Some people uses mysql cluster, we use a proprietary DB layer for data 
partitioning and failover. For this number of subscribers i suggest to go 
with more then two database boxes, because of high-availability and load 
issues.

I think that you either should invest quite a lot of time into creating a 
proper testing environment and some qualitity assurence processes, or just 
hire someone who has build such a system before. Its not possible to give you 
an easy recipe for such a setup.

Cheers,

Henning