Allworx Technical Support Forum

I am researching the different options for redundancy for our phone lines, but also the pbx itself. Can anyone describe their current setup regarding failover?

We have a SIP trunk and we are looking to add a PRI backup. The SIP trunk goes out all the time. Can the allworx have SIP and PRI connected at the same time? It has the ports for it, but will the configuration allow it? Would you have to reconfigure it from one to the other? Does anyone use the FXO lines as backup? How does that work? If you have all three being used can you setup a round robin for outbound calls?

In regards to device failover, does anyone use the multisite option for that? The literature states "Real-time monitoring with automatic failover". Can anyone elaborate? Could you have two local servers with one on SIP and one on PRI and the failover work that way?

I am just trying to think of all my options. I am sure I am missing some configurations. For instance could I setup some type of SIP redundancy outside of the allworx entirely? And I believe with the phone lines it would be considered more of a backup instead of redundancy, because we would have a whole new set of numbers. Or is there some way to have two phone providers offer service to the same set of numbers?

We actually figured out that our primary ISP has disaster redirect for our SIP phone lines. If the system goes down they can forward the numbers to the number setup on our second ISP.

We have 4 Allworx servers through the organization. Our SIP trunks going to each are setup in a Round Robin configuration--if SIP Trunk 1 goes down, the calls for that trunk are sent through Trunk 2 (and so on). Each server's failover partner is setup with all of the DIDs of the primary, and then the calls are routed back to the appropriate destination on the primary system. In the event that the primary system is unavailable, key DIDs are set to fail over to cell phones.

In theory it works great, except for two problems.

1. Allworx reports back a call failure to the SIP provider if none of the destination devices are available. In other words, if I unplug my desk phone and someone calls my DID, Allworx reports a call failure (rather than going to my voicemail). So the SIP provider redirects the call to the secondary server...only the same thing happens. It's a pain when a remote site becomes unavailable, because rather than going to voicemail, it starts failing over from System 1 to System 2 to System 3; we don't have the DIDs on system 3, so it rings to the first route group on that system. We have one site that occasionally gets calls for the other side of the country because of this.

2. It's useless when Windstream goes down, which has happened a lot more than it should lately...