I’m looking to build a pair of matching Asterisk servers for a 250+ employee company. We use mainly Dell servers so I was looking in that direction of this. I saw on the wiki where some models are not recommended and I wondered about the SC1420 or the 1800. I also noticed the buisness edition is tested on a dell 2850, can someone explain what the advantages are to using that hardware?
Thanks for your help.
The advantage would be it is know to work. The first asterisk I set up I had several problems with missed interrupts and such. I then got one of hte tested intel boards that was listed on the wiki and all those problems went away.
i’m using SC1425 with asterisk 1.2beta. it works just the way i want it. its really up to you to configure it. have used ABE also works fine with my sc1425 dell server.
voip-info.org/wiki/view/TDM400P
8th generation Dell Poweredge servers are reputed (by Dell) to run properly with the Digium boards (the timing issues will not occur that lead to the poor POTS call quality issues). I personally confirmed the PowerEdge 830 works correctly - testing with Rev. H TDM400P boards.
Hi,
I am thinking of acquiring the Dell PowerEdge SC1425, hope someone would post any experience running Asterisk 1.2 with it in a production environment. Thanks.
Regards
we have 8 2850’s, and they work great. the lack of IRQ adjustability is a drawback, but you can get around it by turning off peripherals you don’t need (pretty much everything) and putting the card in the right slot.
we put about 50 users per box, and we’re not even close to being CPU limited (granted, we’re using uLaw as a codec, so that helps…but we also have mysql and httpd running for our management and reporting consoles).
we’ve been pretty happy with the dell’s, and fedora core 4 recognizes all the hardware out of the box.
HTH.
Thanks for your advice.
I am looking at low-cost 1U units, PowerEdge SC1425 fits the bill and 2850 is beyond budget. Digital/Analog PSTN interface is not required at the moment, but might be useful in future. Each unit should support up to 25 concurrent calls. The DB backend should run on the same system. Appreciate further advice. Thanks.
Regards
a dual proc machine with a few GB of RAM should be able to handle 25 concurrent calls without an issue, IMHO. you should have some overhead left over, as long as you’re not doing a bunch of transcoding or database intensive queries…
it all depends - if you really want to know, you might call digum - they would be able to give you a better idea of your exact capacity, but it varies so much between installations, due to network speed, codec usage, and other variables.
The DB backend would be used for CDR and Realtime Static. Preliminary tests on a desktop system yield positive results. However, transcoding is required, I have yet to conduct any test.
I had trouble getting SIPP to work for stress testing my system, wouldn’t compile on BSD, Windows binaries failed also(“Error opening terminal: cygwin”). Any advice?
yeah, build a linux box and test with that…i’m hoping you’re going to run linux in production…
i can build a * 1.2 box in under an hour, from start to finish, using fedora core 4. that is my favorite flavor of linux, but gentoo and slackware are both popular around here as well. i would try one of those three, personally, and skip the windoze binaries totally.
I had played with various Linux distros also, Slackware and Redhat to name 2. No intention of starting a flame war/debate, I just prefer BSD(OpenBSD in particular) given a choice. And yes, I dislike/distrust Windows as a server platform. However, all OSes have their values if used ‘properly’. Check out OpenBSD if you are looking for a secure and reliable system, the learning curve is steep though from my experience(4 years on/off personal usage and still consider myself a newbie).
Will try SIPP on Linux. Freshmeat’s status is Production/Stable. Any advice?
asterisk should build on the BSDs just fine if they dont let us know
also, i’ve had issues running sipp on anything but linux but once you have it on linux it seems to be a great for load testing/stress testing
i’ve setup my SC1425 more than 3months ago using centos 4.2 and asterisk 1.2.1. runs fine, i have 30 clients in it, and 1 tdm card with 4 fxo modules. designed an ivr for those from pstn who wanted to call inside our company. haven’t changed or upgraded it yet to 1.2.5 coz it still functions well, on my upgrade am planning to use ael, any tips on using ael here? thanks! 
Thanks, SwK. Compiled SIPP on Slackware 10.1, prelimary test shown it’s working.
ryanalupa, sorry but I have yet to try ael.