I am running a dual Opteron server at the moment which hosts both Asterisk, websites and Mail services under Xen. I would like to move Asterisk onto its own dedicated hardware as sometimes I do get jitter and voice breakup due to running virtualised.
I am thing about a rackmount server with the following spec :-
Jetway JNC92 1.6GHz Dual Core Atom Motherboard with 1x Gigabit LAN; 2GB DDR2 667 Memory; Couple of 80GB HDs.
I will only have a maximum of 2 concurrent calls and will be using the commercial Digium G729 codec.
Will this hardware be sufficient ? Would I get away with 1GB RAM and a single core Atom and save some pennies ?
Instead of the two 80GB HDs I have also thought about a single 30GB SSD as voicemails etc will be stored on another server. Thoughts ?
Dont know if this will help you at all but here is some of the info on my “server.” I have 8 Sip phones all running ulaw and two fxs and 1 fxo plus I also have a sip account with an ITSP. I have never had an issue with it. The only issue I have seen was when I was using a linksys switch I got a lot of jitter then I bought a Netgear switch and it went away.
james@stewie:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 44
model name : AMD Sempron™ Processor 3000+
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 1799.950
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni lahf_lm ts fid vid ttp tm stc
bogomips : 3603.10
clflush size : 64
james@stewie:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 710116 693236 16880 0 153020 452152
So for my requirements it would seem a Intel Atom would be okay. For completeness I have 1 x Snom 360 and 4 x Snom M3s connected to Asterisk 1.4.1.13 currently.
Instead of going rackmount, Jetway has mini-itx barebones systems with that (or similar) motherboards. Newegg has them as well.
Rackmount server chasis aren’t cheap. The cheapest one on New egg, that comes with a power supply, which may or may not work with that motherboard is 90 bucks. Doesn’t seem to make sense to pay almost as much for the mobo/cpu as it does for the chassis.
This one has a riser card and 2 PCI slots if you need to add FXO/FXS cards. newegg.com/Product/Product.a … 6856107036 Looks like they might be out of stock though. It still appears on Jetway’s site.
I was looking at them myself recently for asterisk. Trying to find out if Solaris will run on it. Asterisk seems to have better performance on Solaris according to what I’ve read, including this comparison thrallingpenguin.com/article … olaris.htm
Rackmount is the way I shall be going for a number of reasons … my concern is whether the specification I have given will provide the necessary level of performance which will be required to run Asterisk. Thank you for your post though
if your asterisk is going to be dedicated… consider running a distro called “astlinux” it includes asterisk 1.4.23, the GUI, as well as you can use it for firewall, DHCP, DNS etc… it is very small footprint and trimmed down for good CPU usage… im running it on a “neo Light” with a Via 800 Mhz Processor and 512 megs ram and have no issues with at least 5 concurrent calls up… in fact I even have meetme running on it and it handles that with 4 users on (havent tried more)…
-Christopher
I have embeded asterisk on ARM processors 200 MHz 32 MB RAM and 8 ROM.
And one call is perfect.
I think your system can handle much much more calls - may be 20 - 30. Depends of transcoding of course.
If you use asterisk just to “forward” calls - meaning G729 is set from SIP phone to the other SIP phone - then there is no transcoding.
3 - 4 years ago I read about tests which claimed that Pentium 4 3 GHz 1 GB RAM can handle 30 - 40 simultaneous calls if without transcoding.
