Asterisk Redundancy & Load Sharing

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I am currently running a Call Center of 100 Agents with 8 Incoming PRIs (240 Channels), The setup is as follows

PRIs terminating in Lucent MAX TNT
Asterisk as SIP Proxy & Registrar
RTC Client API (Windows Messenger) as SIP Phone

All incoming calls on the MAX are redirected to Asterisk (TNT’s Primary Proxy is *), * answers the calls and adds them in to the Queue (app_queue) & starts playing MOH, as soon as an agent is available the call will be transferred to that agent

I need sugestions for Load sharing and Redundancy of my Asterisk server becuase right now if my Asterisk fails theres no backup available for it.

One solution for Redundancy that I can think of is to install Asterisk on another machine and set it as TNT’s secondry proxy so whenever there will be a failure on Primary Asterisk, TNT will start sending calls to Secondary Asterisk but there will be 2 problems, First is that what will happen if secondary Asterisk will fail too (TNT doesnt have support for more than a Primary & Secondary Proxy) & Second is that my SIP Agents dont support the functionality of Secondary Registrar.

For load sharing I dont have any idea of what to do because all of my agents are registered on one Asterisk & using the Queue application, I wpuld like to implement some sort of load sharing becasue I want to expand my call center (virtually to unlimited number of PRIs and Agents). I understand there are many possible senarios but any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

2

anyone out there with a reply ?

3

check out openser.org. I have been itching to play with this myself for a similar situation and will explore it further upon the need arising. Let me know if this helps any.

4

the simple answer would be to put the two * boxes on a load balancer so if one fails it will assign the IP to another one. THis can also be done in software i think.

OpenSER might be a good option for you, it would sit between the TNT and Asterisk(s), and distribute the calls that way. It can also in some cases sit between the agents and *; so agents register to OpenSER and this reduces the * load… I’ve never used it tho so this is just what I’ve heard.