recommendation for 100 seat setup

[aster1]

I have done vicidial installation successfully for a few times now for less number of seats (10-30 ) . I need some advice on a huge setup like 100 seats . What would be the hardware recommended for setup of 100 seats ? like how many asterisk server's /sql server,etc .. Suggestions are welcome

[aster1]

Calling would be mostly predictive .. ulaw on agent side and gsm on carrier side ( all voip setup with sip or iax2 ) . All calls will be recorded .

[mflorell]

With all voip and all calls recorded you are going to need several machines.

Will you be storing these recordings for any length of time?

What codec will you be using?

I would recommend a dedicated DB server and a dedicated web server for a 100 seat setup.

[aster1]

Yeh i will get 4-5 good servers for the purpose . I will use ulaw on agent side and gsm on carrier side for making calls .

1 Database server - 1 gb ram and core2duo or pentium D processors
1 web server - same as above .

and core2duo for running asterisk and vicidial should be fine ?

I suppose 1 core2duo 2.6 ghz with 1 gb of ram can handle 20 agents with no problem ( Full recording and gsm on carrier side and ulaw on server side ) .

[ramindia]

Hi

go with xeon dual processor servers with 3 or 4GB, SCSI Disks
to achieve the maximum performance.

i have not used RAID, but i belive in database or recording server
use RAID 10 will be good i belive, iam also planning to deploy
RAID10 and see if the performance increases

ram

[mflorell]

Get as much RAM as you can on your DB server. 1-2GB should be fine for web and Asterisk servers.

Recording all calls and using GSM you shouldn't go over 24 agents on a single server, and I would recommend no more than 20.

[aster1]

In vicidial servers is it feasible to use app_conference instead of meetme ... has anybody successfully used it in production or meetme with x100p is a better solution ?

EDIT:
If we use ulaw on both agent as well as provider side and hook up another pure asterisk box just to transcode from ulaw to gsm and this box acts as provider to vicidial .
So now vicidial box has ulaw on both agent side as well as provider side then how many agents a core2duo or dual xeon can handle ( with no transcoding 1 gb ram and mysql+apache on another box ) . Will it handle 50 agents ( full recording with raid 0 or 0+1 and maybe recording on ramdrive if required ) ??

I am thinking about this solution bcoz this will simplify setup to a huge extent . What i need to know is if this is better than having 2 vicidial server load balanced .

[Op3r]

seriously putting 50 agents on a single server does not make sense. No matter what you do dont put more 20-25 on each asterisk server. You also need to put x100p in it.

here's a set up for you

1 Dbase server
1 http server

then if you have dual xeon with 4 gb of memory

you can have 25 on each asterisk server.

it will also be easy to manage. if one of the asterisk server fails at least it will just be a segment not the whole thing.

and the other. You can have a gateway to do all the transcoding.

[aster1]

Thanks all of you for your suggestions . I think its best to have the modular approach with 20 agents per server and a diff web and http server .

[gardo]

20-25 agents per vicidial is a safe number specially w/ full recordings enabled. if you want to go higher than that, get the fastest scsi harddisks available or go ramdrive for storage. your bottleneck will be the disk io.

[ramindia]

Hi

can that be possible

recording store in other box, via Gigabit ethernet ?
Kind of remote Drive or NAS, or virtually mounted drive of other server

to save the load ?

ram

[mflorell]

Yes, you can NAS recordings, but that NAS server will still be limited in the number of concurrent recordings to 50-60 unless you use a RAM drive on it, then you can record over 200 concurrent streams on a high-end box

[ramindia]

Hi

200 concurrent streams on a high-end box

this can be achived by what config should be the recording server

how about connecting back to back Gigabit ethernet with cross cable.
Vicidial server and Recording Server.

ram

[mflorell]

Gigabit ethernet is unnecessary, regular 100Mb full duplex will handle hundreds of streams with no problem.

[kbenson]

Gigabit ethernet is unnecessary, regular 100Mb full duplex will handle hundreds of streams with no problem.

The way I read what they are talking about, they are referring to the gigabit ethernet for use in the SAN, so it would be carrying NFS or SMB traffic, and they would be writing wav directly across that. At 1/8th of a Mbit/second per recording, they could theoretically get 800 recording across a single 100 Mbit link, ignoring overhead for ethernet, TCP/IP, and SMB or NFS.

That said, as long as you have a dedicated link to the NAS device, your bottleneck will most likely be the disk onthe NAS as previously stated. A newer generation 3ware can get you pretty damn good performanse on RAID5, and you can use 750-1000 GB disks in it.

[ramindia]

Hi

thats explaination is intresting

How about if the same server using for mysql and recordings
( i was reading some documents, they says to deploy RAID10) for both.

I belive some of intresting want to share with people

but still confused what need to be used, can some one confirm
what are their experinces with RAID's using in live setup.

Code: Select all

> 1) When should RAID 5 be implemented?

- When you want maximum storage capacity per disk
  (the more disks, the better)
- When you have largely read-only data
- When much of your read-only data is in a database
- When you have buffering RAID hardware

RAID-5 acts like RAID-0 during reads.
But during writes RAID-5 can get bogged down in commits and requires a
lot of buffer.

7) What are the disadvantages of using RAID 5 vs. RAID 10?

Write performance, especially on a direct, block device like [S]ATA.
Unless you are building a web server where all you'll be doing is
reading 99.9% of the time, I recommended highly against RAID-5.

And even when building a web server, I still recommend the "system"
drive be RAID-10. E.g., with an 8-channel controller, consider:

- 4-disc RAID-10 System
- 3-disc RAID-5 Data
- 1-disc Hot Spare (which can be used for _either_

With a 12-channel controller, make the RAID-5 data volume 7-discs.

ram

[kbenson]

Hi

thats explaination is intresting

How about if the same server using for mysql and recordings
( i was reading some documents, they says to deploy RAID10) for both.

I belive some of intresting want to share with people

but still confused what need to be used, can some one confirm
what are their experinces with RAID's using in live setup.

ram

With 3ware's latest, you can get 800 MB/sec RAID6 reads and 600 MB/sec RAID6 writes (which you can take with a grain of salt, and I'm also sure it's the 12 port card). That's the reason I recommened a new generation card, they have fairly sophisticated parity engines on the card to give you the minimum slowdown. Thes numbers are what they quote for computing parity TWICE for every calculation (RAID 6 has two parity data sets, and allows for two drive failures without data loss). There's no point building an extrmemly fast RAID array at the expense of capacity and cost if you never utilize that performance. That said, look for some real world examples before believing everything you read in the marketing info for a RAID card.