Ok I have been using and recommending Astaro since v2. However unless they turn things around I will no longer recommend it. Extremely disappointed with support, the only way I can get someone to call me is if I yell at the guy on the sales team!
The current astaro I am dealing with and the only ones I have had major issues with is the ASG220s running v7. These were purchased right about the time v7 was released and did not have the option to get v6. From day one they have been a nightmare. We purchased 2 to run in HA mode, I am going out to the datacenter about once a week to restart a firewall that has completely locked up. Constantly getting emails of some service restarting because it failed, most of the time it is ctsync (HA service). Have submitted numerous support tickets even opened up the machines for Astaro employees to have remote access. We had to disable the SMTP proxy because it can not handle 50,000 emails a day, EVEN THOUGH Astaro says a 220 can process 300,000 emails a day. Only services we have running is packet filtering, IPS, and VPN for use by a single user only (me for maintenance). I disabled pretty much all packet filtering logs because of performance issues. If you are thinking we must have a large amount of traffic well we do not, the highest we have seen for concurrent connections is ~2000 (Astaro says the box can handle 400,000). Throughput peaks are around 2-3 Mbit/s, again Astaro says this box can handle up to 320 Mbits/s.
Our most recent failure was a fun one, for whatever reason one of the sqllite db got corrupted and the log system decided to report this event frantically filling the logs at a rate of 10 MegaBytes/min and pegging the CPU. Before I could get to it to solve it since it started at 2am the system log reached 10GB. Supports solution was to fail that machine to slave then factory reset the machine and add it back to the cluster. Ok sure, well when I failed the machine over the new master spiked the CPU load to 100%. I waited hoping it would settle down, it did not after an hour. Checked the process that was causing this it was csync, what was it syncing to the slave was offline? So I decided well lets proceed with the plan. Of course the slave can not sync to the master because the master is apparently confused. So I decided on to plan B. I will factory reset BOTH machines. Since the slave was already reset I took the backup config that I made before this and applied it. Swapped the Slave with the Master to minimize downtime (we have HA because downtime is not accepted). The reset the master to factory and added it to the cluster. That has been running for about a day and I get an email saying Content Filter not running, restarting. Why would i get that I have content filtering OFF?
Course now I am trying to get Astaro support on the phone to explain to me WHY the ASG220 can not handle our load reliably. I suspect a large part of our issues stems from the fact that the hardware is way under spec'd.
Sorry for the long rant however, I am extremely disappointed and embarrassed frankly with Astaro. I have been a long supporter of the products and these machines we are using because I highly recommended them when the Synmantic machines died. Support USE to be good but now it is probably one of the worst companies I have to deal with for support.
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