Benefit of Agent Only Servers

[Nefariousparity]

What is the benefit of Agent Only Servers? I was thinking of building my new cluster like this.

3x Telephony Dual Quad Core 2.83ghz 8GB Memory 2x SSD Raid Zero
3x Agent only Servers Dual Quad Core 8GB Memory 2x SSD Raid Zero
1x Database 32GB Memory Dual Quad Core 3.0ghz 6X SSD Raid 10
1x Web 16 Gb Memory Dual Quad Core 3.0ghz 2x SSD
1x Archive 6X 400GB SAS Raid 10

I have like 15 servers just hanging out that is why I am having fun. Does Agent only really make a difference in load balancing?

[williamconley]

I'd have to defer to Matt and Kumba on this one, as I've never had a client "throw" that many servers at a cluster unless they were all fully loaded. And to date no one has had SIP trunking separated from Agents. But my guess would be that the advantage would be minimal and not likely to make up for the wasted resources. However, if you've got 'em ... waste em. LOL

In essence: When a call arrives, the call has to be routed to an agent through that original server. This is true even if calls on A end up with agents on B while other calls on B end up with agents on A, thus creating extra work in that scenario. On the other hand, sometimes calls on A end up with agents on A ... no extra channel required. In your scenario, all calls would have the extra channel since there are NO agents on the trunking servers.

[nandotech]

I'd venture to say probably not, maybe useful for inbound routing setups since you can specify server from DID...Otherwise I'm not so sure.

Otherwise, I'd say you'd be better served with a slave DB & just make all those Telephony servers. Essentially just gives you more capacity.

The thing that limits the amount of calls that can be placed is generally asterisk, so if you only have 3 servers dialing (telephony) then that will be your call placing bottleneck.
So I'd say (assuming same hardware to play with) to set up 5xTelephony (which are also agent servers), 1xDB, 1x Slave DB, 1x Web & 1xArchive

[williamconley]

Combining slave DB and archive is also common. And if you defer archive functions until after hours, any server can be archive.

[Nefariousparity]

Thanks for the response guys! I know that sometimes our current cluster setup we get opener agents that are stuck in transfers. And if they hang up, it hangs up the call for them and for the closer.(I head read once, that a slight increase in load could cause this) I was trying to really distribute load. I was under the impression that if one set of Telephony was doing the dialing, and agents were on Agent Only servers. Then they could be transferring even if there is a spike in dialing. And yes I have 14 Dell PowerEdge 2950 II at my disposal.