Moving to asterisk. Thinking about a virtualized Vicidialer

[jsuds]

The company I'm working at will be moving their offices soon. It's not worth moving the old nortel pbx and existing dialer system imo. So, I started messing around with asterisk and ordered a couple of sip trunks so that I can hopefully have it running next week. I'm planning to do limited testing of asterisk first, and then if the owners are happy with call quality (they're nervous about voip), I will move the rest of the company over to the asterisk system. After that, I'd need to be thinking about switching to vicidial.

I'm not sure how much money I have to play with yet. Right now, I have no spare servers, and the budget is very tight right now. Even my UPS is basically shot and unreliable.

What I do have is a Dell Poweredge 2950 running Virtual Iron (competitor to vmware). It's configured with one dual-core Xeon 5200 (i can add a second if i ever need it), 4GB, and a 150GB Raid 5 array composed of 3 15k SAS disks + a 300 GB Raid 1 array from 10k disks. It's currently hosting a domain controller, exchange server, and an sql server. The cpu usage is low, so I could easily double the memory for a few hundred bucks, and add another drive for mysql.

The reason I like this option is that it has redundant everything, and a DRAC card so that I can have full control and even power-cycle it from remote locations (i'm the only it guy and i do all their programming and networking and am away a lot). I also need to buy a ups... So add in another 1000 bucks. It would be nice if the ups just had to worry about powering one system and could keep it up for a long time (especially if it's our pbx). And, down the road if I need more capacity (and there's more money), I can always add another server and move the virtual machines to it.

The system will need to handle 20-25 people on the dialer + 15-20 regular phone users. At the beginning it will be 15 phone + 20dialer and i'm planning on 30 sip trunks.

So the VMs I'm thinking of are:
-asterisk+vici: 1.5GB, share the 300gb raid 1 array for VM/recordings storage
-apache/mysql: 2GB, dedicated 15k drive

The other benefit to me is that I would like to get another poweredge server once money becomes available. That way I would have an easy upgrade path for all of my VMs if the current system becomes bogged down. There would be no need to re-install or reconfigure. I would be able to click a button to move it from one node to the other without any downtime.

Thoughts? Sure, I could build a cheap system for 1k bucks, but i would have to spend more to get the redundancy and remote access I can already get with the dell. My budge is going to be very tight and we also have to replace the phones and headsets, which will all add up.

[mflorell]

I would actually recommend going the $1000 server route. VICIDIAL is very disk intensive(especially MySQL and if you are recording) and very CPU intensive, and if you get someone archiving their Outlook mailbox at the same time they are doing an intensive SQL query, you could see your voice quality go to garbage.

As for Dell, the reason they build in so much redundancy in is because you need it with the quality of the parts they use. One of my clients has three Dell 2950(two quad-core Xeons with 8GB RAM) servers that are about 1 year old that they are using for VICIDIAL. They live in a carrier-run colo center and only one of them still has its original motherboard in it. I have had more issues with Dell than I have time to go into them, so my opinion of using Dell servers for very intensive applications like VICIDIAL is very low. I always recommend using Asus or SuperMicro and have had a much better reliability record with those two as compared to Dell.

As for running VICIDIAL in a virtual machine, at higher load levels it seems to have a bad effect on voice quality due to the non-hardware timer that you have to use when doing Asterisk on VM.

No matter what you decide, please let us know how your install goes.

Now a few questions for you:
- what kind of calls will your VICIDIAL system need to handle
- inbound/outbound/blended
- what audio codec will you use for your trunks
- if outbound, what is your max lines-to-agent-ratio
- what kind of internet connection are your SIP trunks going over

[jsuds]

Thanks.

[jsuds]

wth.. won't let me post rest of message

[jsuds]

Ok lets try again...

Right now I have asterisk running on the VM. I'm still waiting on trunks so i haven't been able to test it yet. I'm getting pretty comfortable with everything now.

on the vm question. I recall reading something about ztdummy using a usb uhci for the timing source but in 2.6 kernel it doesn't need to. I also read that it was believed that problems with ztdummy often stemmed from the uhci. Are people still having the weird probs with the 2.6 kernel and ztdummy? I guess that would be a case for a cheapo server and a zaptel card...


Totally unrelated question. Does astGUI conflict in any way with the gui used in AsteriskNOW? I SVNed it so that someone other than me could do the mundane stuff and have a pretty gui to do it in.

edit: tried answering other questions and i keep getting some spammer message about personal info and URLs... I did'nt use either...

[mflorell]

The 2.6 Linux kernel is much better with ztdummy, the problem is when you have higher CPU loads(which you will have running in a VM) the timer cannot stay as accurate as a dedicated hardware timer would and you will get voice quality degradation.

Sorry about the filters on posting, adding them has cut down on over 100 SPAM messages a day here. After you have posted a few times across a few days.

[saleh]

Dear mflorell,

What is the ASUS mother board model, you are using with the P4-D and the P4 core 2 duo processors like Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU ?

Thanks
Saleh

[mflorell]

For Asus I have been using the P5K3 and the P5NT WS motherboards a lot with good results. For SuperMicro, just about everything seems to work great as well.