No. of cards I can use in one box

Is there any limit on the number of digium cards that I can use in one box?

thanx
Sumit

digium cards are pretty finicky in regards to IRQ’s and whatnot…if you got a motherboard that allowed you to define the IRQs manually, then i suppose the theoretical limit is based on how many slots you have open. in reality, i haven’t heard anyone get more than 2 in the same box.

now, if you’re looking at sangoma cards, they (supposedly) don’t have the same issues, and you can shove quite a few in the same box. i hope to be testing this theory at some point, as we just switched from digium TE410P to sangoma A104d cards, for all 8 of our servers. we don’t have the need for more than 96 trunks on a single server yet, but we may in the future…from what i’ve read, the sangoma boards should handle this sort of configuration much better.

I do know one thing for sure…

I have heard MANY smart Asterisk guys say that they would flat out NOT put more than one card, ever in a server.

The thinking here is that if you need more than what a single card can do, then it’s likely you need another server to handle the call load. Of course, this is true with PRI cards but not the same with analog cards.

I think many people consider a channel bank to be a better solution for lots of analog lines.

Either way, I just wanted to mention that we have heard time and time again that it’s just flat out a bad idea to use more than one card.

That’s not to say it won’t work and I think this info comes from people that expect everyone to build a monster production system. If you are just building a system with little use for home or small office then all bets are off.