PortSIP PBX High Availability Architecture

A three-node PortSIP PBX high-availability (HA) cluster provides resilience and service continuity. PortSIP PBX can detect multiple types of node failures and automatically fail over control to another healthy PBX node. When a failover occurs, established calls are automatically recovered, minimizing service disruption.

Figure 1-1 PortSIP PBX HA Architecture


Pacemaker

Pacemakerarrow-up-right is a high-availability Cluster Resource Manager (CRM) used to manage and monitor cluster resources. It ensures that critical services remain available by:

  • Monitoring the health of PBX nodes and cluster resources

  • Detecting failures and triggering failover events

  • Automatically moving PBX resources to a healthy node when a node fails

In the PortSIP PBX HA deployment, Pacemakerarrow-up-right is responsible for resource monitoring and failover orchestration, ensuring that services are automatically brought online on an operational node when failures occur.


AWS EBS

Amazon EBSarrow-up-right(Amazon Elastic Block Store) is a scalable, high-performance block storage service for Amazon EC2. EBSarrow-up-right volumes behave like persistent block devices (similar to physical disks) and can be:

  • Attached to EC2 instances as storage devices

  • Formatted with a filesystem and mounted

  • Resized or reconfigured dynamically

  • Retained independently from the lifecycle of an EC2 instance

In the PortSIP PBX HA scenario, EBS is used to keep critical PBX data synchronized across nodes, including:

  • Databases (DB)

  • Call recordings

  • Log files

  • Prompt and media files

This shared/persistent storage approach allows a standby node to quickly assume service responsibility with the latest data available after failover.


Client Access via Elastic IP

In an HA deployment, all SIP clients—including IP phones, desktop softphones, mobile apps, and WebRTC clients—connect to the PBX using the Elastic IP.

Using an Elastic IP ensures:

  • A single, consistent SIP server address for all clients

  • Seamless failover (the Elastic IP moves to the active node)

  • No need to reconfigure endpoints when a node change occurs

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