I am looking to deploy Asterisk. I have been a long time lurker, but never bit the bullet.
My concerns in looking through the bug fixes and change log is that there are a fair number of fixes for crashes.
I am looking to deploy a “main” asterisk Server in a remote Data center in Florida, with a satellite in eastern Europe. I will be installing on a new IBM xSeries Server running SuSE. I will be using Digium add on cards for connectivity.
This raises some questions to me:
Is Asterisk Stable enough for a remote deployments like this?
Is Asterisk "so unstable’ that I need to deploy 2 servers in a HA configuration, or is the Dual server configuration I see all over the web to account for hardware failures?
I think Asterisk is very stable. I would stick with 1.4.X over 1.6.X for now.
It is always good to have a fail over solution. There are many companies using asterisk including RNK (rnktel.com/ - which is a pretty big company) but they will never admit it. If you set it up correctly (e.g. OpenSIPS+Asterisk) you should be OK. Make sure you are in a DC that has quality bandwidth and that they wont butcher your packets or queue them.
Just remember that because Asterisk is open source you can see all the bug reports. Closed source apps have as many or more “crash” bugs in them, they just dont publish the list so you never even knew they were there unless you had the crash!
Most (not all just most) of the “crash” reports are things that happen using certain features certian ways, you may never even use those features so it may never be a problem for you.
At this point Asterisk has been installed in thousands of medium sized businesses with multiple locations so it pretty safe to say its a stable product. I also agree that you should stick with 1.4 unless you really need a 1.6 feature. It takes about a 12-18 months after the initial release to really get a stable product (this is true for open ans well as closed source projects).
As far as an HA setup this is higly recommended for any phone system. The nice part about Asterisk is its cheap to get HA as you just need a second server at hardware cost only.
we run asterisk at the core of our business, and we are hosted call center solutions provider. We run between 500,000 and 1,000,000 calls through our network of servers every day.
i have run a handful of the 1.4 versions and they all seem to have something minor wrong with them I think of it as an opportunity to give back to the community by opening bug reports, getting things fixed, and making an overall better product.
We run a cloud of asterisk servers behind a couple OpenSER (Kamailio) SIP gateways.
I think of it as an opportunity to give back to the community by opening bug reports, getting things fixed, and making an overall better product.