I’m new in town and am looking to buy in some hardware for a moderately serious Asterisk box (including 4 or 8 PRI cards, probably Digium). Would appreciate any comments as to whether or not the Itox g4h875 with 2.8Ghz P4, 1GB RAM would be appropriate.
I guess the main thing is interrupts, and given that this board seems fairly Intellish, I would guess that it would be OK. The other thing is SATA for Linux (we’re currently on ubuntu 5.10) - this is SATA 1.0, so won’t be a screamer, but should be at least as good as PATA, right?
I’ve browsed around to see what others seem to be using and it looks like people are throwing some pretty serious hardware at Asterisk.
Are there any guides on what hardware is required to run Asterisk trouble-free? I can specify number of call setups/second (both SIP and Zaptel) and maxmimum number of simultaneous calls etc.
Or is it not a science - more a case of “suck it and see”?!
Perhaps my notion of a single P4 3.0GHz being able to drive 4 ports of Digium and 500 simultaneous SIP sessions (but no transcoding) is unrealistic?
It all depends on how serious the phone system is?. If its going to be used as a primary PBX for a medium to large scale company you need serious hardware. But it isnt performance you want to looking at first stability and then look at performance as budget allows, just one thing to note stay away from 2 or more Zeon CPU’s absolute trash. Our company has multiple sites and im in the process of creating a * box in the main office which will be the central server and it consists of:
Zippy 3x400watt Redundant Powersupply (Hot swap the machine keeps running with only one PSU module active)
Tyan K8WE Dual Socket AMD Opteron Server Motherboard (Rock solid expecially on linux)
2GB Ecc Registered RAM
2 x AMD Opteron 270 2ghz Dual Core Processors (Needed for us as there will be alot of IVR stuff running as well as transcoding ).
2 x WD Raptor 10000rpm SATA 74gb harddisks in Raid 1 (Machine keeps running with 1 disk faliure. 1 60Gb Raid 0 Partition to save recorded calls)
3 x Belkin UPS’s 1200V.A each.
But no it isnt an exact science unfortunatly. If you give me some info on what asterisk server will be doing I can give you a rough idea what sort of spec you should be looking at as ive installed and tested asterisk on a load of different hardware spec’s.
10 call setup pairs/second (mix of SIP-PRI and SIP-SIP)
NO TRANSCODING
All traffic flows through the box (so no reinviting)
We’re going to build 2 identical boxes and regard them as sealed units so that if one goes down, the other can take the load. This means that things like redundant PSUs are not such an issue.
BTW - what Linux distro/build are you using? (And what PRI card(s))
Also - anyone else experienced problems with dual Xeon?
Well at the moment im using Mandriva 2006 x86_64 running kernel-smp-2.6.12-12mdksmp but the zaptel module wont load after compiling and installing . All I get is this error “FATAL: Error inserting zaptel (/lib/modules/2.6.12-12mdksmp/misc/zaptel.ko): Invalid module format”. I have a feeling its something to do with the SMP kernel so im going to try non smp but ill loose most of the performance .
I think your spec would be appropriate nice pick with the motherboard its got some clever IRQ handling, although if the budget would stretch I would go for a slightly faster P4 and perhaps more RAM too just so you have leyway if there is anytime were there is excessivly high load. Also if your just putting one card in go for digium if your going to be using 2 or more in one server go sangoma.
Having thought 3.4GHz would be the way to go, I see that it’s a heck of a lot more expensive (at least in 478 form) than the 3.2, so I think 3.2 looks like it’s going to win the day…
).
. All I get is this error “FATAL: Error inserting zaptel (/lib/modules/2.6.12-12mdksmp/misc/zaptel.ko): Invalid module format”. I have a feeling its something to do with the SMP kernel so im going to try non smp but ill loose most of the performance 
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