tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2158853543793456735.post2470967162192470213..comments2023-10-02T04:50:01.667-07:00Comments on VoIPNorm's Collaboration Blog: VoIPNorm MythBusters: The Great Server MythChris Normanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07200178774058910421noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2158853543793456735.post-43063100132804079602010-07-16T18:34:47.940-07:002010-07-16T18:34:47.940-07:00All great points Nemo. This is going to be a kille...All great points Nemo. This is going to be a killer supported scenario that will be welcomed in the small busniess space. This also may make a great blog post to talk about it.Chris Normanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07200178774058910421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2158853543793456735.post-47176030821575916312010-07-16T18:30:30.365-07:002010-07-16T18:30:30.365-07:00Well busted indeed!
One comment. You said:
"...Well busted indeed!<br /><br />One comment. You said:<br /><i>"if a thrifty company wants to remove high availability and settle for disaster recovery, still maintaining the magical 5 nines (99.999% uptime) for voice they could do so with less servers again in wave 14 using side by side Standard Edition Servers"</i><br /><br />That is correct but I think it is important to provide more explanations as in my opinion this is a killer-capability for small businesses.<br /><br />Let's first understand what we mean by high-availability. It's a server redundancy mechanism (typically achieved via costly hardware load balancers) so that a server failure would be virtually transparent (minus some brief potential impacts).<br /><br />Meanwhile the new failover/resiliency capabilities in CS14 enable clients (end points) to register to a primary registrar and instantly failover to a backup registrar when the primary is no longer available. <br /><br />The beauty of it is that as long as your client can see a registrar (and assuming a PSTN connection is available), you will be able to at least perform the most important functions (place and receive calls, etc).<br /><br />Say your company has 2 main sites, each with say 500 employees, connected by a decent WAN (preferably with WAN resiliency but not an absolute must). Suppose you put a Standard Edition server in each site, and even better put in those servers a gateway on a card (such as the one offered by Ferrari) - now you have 2 registrars and 2 survivable branches. If one of the servers is in maintenance or fails, the other will be the registrar and provide services for all users.<br /><br />The resulting availability from a basic scenario (place and retrieve calls in particular, but not just that) is very high, <b>without having to use hardware load balancers</b>. That's the beauty of it - very cheap, easy, functional.<br /><br />What's the catch (there is always one, of course)? Well, during the failover, only some (most important but basic) capabilities will be available to the users homed on the server that is unavailable. Typically what will be missing is contact list and presence and things that derive immediately from presence such as presence based routing, things that have been scheduled (meetings...). But telephony works (*), and many other capabilities, including peer to peer capabilities in the branch.<br /><br />If you want a very economical solution, and can accept the potential impact (loss of some advanced features, but voice works) of occasional server failure (and this is 2010, servers' MTBF is pretty good); and manage around the impact of server scheduled maintenance, then this may well be a solution for you.<br /><br />Work is still going on with respect to what will be supported virtualized, but (crossing fingers) if the Standard Edition server is supported in that mode, you could also have say a Domain Controller or maybe an Exchange Server on that box... Sweet!<br /><br />(*) note that inbound calls may require rerouting on failure by your PSTN provider or a separate gateway - rather than the blade in the server - that would redirect inbound calls while the server is unavailable.<br /><br />Also note that if you are experiencing a longer term outage, it is possible to move the users to the remaining server - restauring all (incl. advanced) capabilities.Captain Nemohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02661117350390916830noreply@blogger.com