What requirements to setup clustering/HA for mivoice business virtual appliance

[pacifichydro]

Hi there

We just migrated from using Mitel Physical controller 3300 to Mitel Mivoice Business virtual appliance and I have received request to look into the setup of clustering/HA for this virtual appliance so that if the main appliance is down, the second one will jump in and serve the client. I believe this will not interrupt our phone system

I just wonder what requirements need for this scenario in term of

1. what technology to setup HA/clustering
2. network requirement
3. licensing cost

thanks all

pacifichydro

[VinceWhirlwind]

Your partner should be able to help you out with architecture and prices.
You will get a 2nd virtual controller that can run on your server farm in your backup data centre. You build it and create a cluster to add both controllers to.
You don't need extra user licences.
Here's the super-fiddly bit though - you will need to change all your users and devices so that they are registered with the new controller as their secondary. You should be able to do this by importing a csv.
Your other bit of resiliency will be to get another MBG and a 2nd SIP service into the 2nd data centre. If the failure mode they are thinking of is the unavailability of the main data centre, then this 2nd SIP service should be a requirement.
 
Your licences for a new virtual controller and a new MBG plus a bit of SWA will only be about $2k, new SIP channels on the other hand can get really pricey. 30 will probably add up to over $4k. And then whatever labour is needed will pretty much cost that much again, depending on how much you do yourself.

[pacifichydro]

thank you very much for your explaination

We have a fully redundant SIP trunk which split across 2 different network part in our data center so the chance that the SIP trunk is down is very minimum. We have a secondary data center but they are the cold site only, we only turn this site on if earthquake happen in the primary data center (both primary and secondary are in synced). So the scenario in here is just for our primary data center 

So I believe from the reading

a second virtual controller (I believe it need to be clustered with the primary controller and all the users/devices and configurations are in synced between each other?). I don't understand why you need to manually change all users and devices as I thought with mitel ( I have seen youtube video as well) the failover is quite transparent to users . Do all the devices/users point to the cluster IP rather individual IP of the primary controller?

As we have single MBG server, how it know the secondary virtual controller if failover happen?

thanks

[VinceWhirlwind]

The users are registered with your existing controller. If you add a secondary controller to the cluster, you will have to edit all the users and devices to insert the 2nd controller in there.
There is no cluster IP, the cluster members know about each other and synchronise data.
You will need to configure the MBG as the new controller's SIP proxy using the same process the first one was configured. I'm pretty sure you will need to duplicate your SIP proxy licences though.

[lundah]

The users are registered with your existing controller. If you add a secondary controller to the cluster, you will have to edit all the users and devices to insert the 2nd controller in there.
There is no cluster IP, the cluster members know about each other and synchronise data.
You will need to configure the MBG as the new controller's SIP proxy using the same process the first one was configured. I'm pretty sure you will need to duplicate your SIP proxy licences though.

Yes you'll need SIP trunk licenses for the backup vMiVB as I don't think those can be shared across a DLM group like the user licenses. Should be good on the MBG as those licenses are only consumed when actively in use.