I’ve been reading alot and considering replacing our aged Meridian DR5 with Startalk VM with an Asterisk box, but not entirely sure of how much server horsepower I’ll need to pull it off.
With our current system we have about 40 extensions, 7 phone lines and 60 mailboxes. We may expand by a few extensions and an extra phone line or two, but no major scaling is anticipated in the next year.
Right now I have a test install on a P4 1.7ghz with 512mb and IDE hard drives… I haven’t ordered the interfaces from Digium yet, but planned on a pair of TDM400’s with 4 FXO’s each.
The main thing that kills the proc is compressed codecs, if you’re using Alaw/Ulaw, you should be OK, provided the board is fast processing interupts. You’ll soon know as you’ll start to get crackling on the lines
What you have will work fine, AS LONG AS you are not using a CPU-heavy compressed codec like iLBC or G.729. If you’re using ulaw/alaw (and have the network bandwidth for it), you will have no trouble whatsoever. You might be able to go with GSM on that, but don’t bother unless network bandwidth is an issue.
Like middletn said, watch your interrupts. Zaptel cards are finicky about missed interrupts, so it may take some tweaking to get them to play nice with your mobo. Make sure they each have their own IRQ, and those IRQs aren’t shared to anything else. If you start getting dropped voice chunks under heavy volume, IRQs are the first place to look.
Thanks for the tips, I’ll definately keep an eye on the IRQ’s and will push for a bit more money for a new mobo & CPU combo as I’d prefer to go with a better compressed codec if at all possible…