Clarifications about ViciDial Capabilities

[stackboost.io]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, so I've tried to do my due diligence and gather information by reading the full manual (it's long - might have missed some stuff) and searching here for answers to my specific questions. Many of the responses I read are several years old, so I'm posting my understanding of the problems/solutions, the premises I'm assuming, and the goals I'm trying to achieve to make sure my understanding is current with ViciBox 9.03.

1. Multi-Tenancy
Part of what I"m trying to achieve is to make ViciDial available to call center clients. I read in the manual that user groups are generally helpful for sequestering agents within their own companies/groups/whatever, but what about administration? Could certain administrative features (list loading, campaign management, for example) be delegated to user groups only for specific campaigns? More broadly, is it possible to have admins that are restricted only to administering their company's assets (I think campaigns and lists are most important), or do we need to use a 1:1 ratio of ViciDial Clusters:Clients to pull off that kind of granularity? As far as I can tell, this multi-tenancy is possible and I can set up a user group for a specific set of campaigns, and allow a user in that group to Modify Campaigns, Load Leads, etc.

2. Integration
Another part of what I'm trying to achieve is to embed the webRTC agent login into a simple iFrame on an external CRM via custom plugin. I understand this will generally work as long as the page doesn't get refreshed or closed, so possibly exclusively using iFrames to load dynamic content on that CRM page. I also want to modify the agent screen, which I understand can be done simply with .css modifications. Does anyone have experience/success with this?

3. Cloud Hosting
As a cloud proponent, I would greatly prefer to host this on a cloud platform, like AWS or Google Cloud. I noticed that there's even a handful of marketplace subscriptions for ViciDial (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/ZapSocket-Vicibox-812-Vicidial-214-689a-for-AWS-EC/B07QNS13FJ, https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07N8Z16XY?qid=1595180814351&sr=0-1&ref_=srh_res_product_title). My understand is that virtualization of any kind will generally not work well due to needing Hi-Res timings for perl scripts. Is this still the case? Are there other reasons? Are these problems addressable? Or does anyone have experience setting up a cloud cluster using these kinds of subscriptions or even manually? Why would they even be there if it was only viable for a handful of agents? I have a lot of interest in running it in the cloud, but there doesn't seem to be a lot written about it, other than various interpretations of "it sucks, don't do it."

4. Self-Hosting
Example Server:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Premium-Dell-PowerEdge-R710-8-Core-Server-32GB-RAM-2x146GB-PERC6i-iDRAC6-/172903509750?hash=item2841da2ef6
-AFAIK this server is on-spec to be a 150 Web Agent database server (two 4 core processors). It's a little short on HD space total but that's an easy problem.
-If the same box was used as a telephony server, it would cover somewhere above 150 agents and below 300 web agents.
-If this box was used for Web and Archive, it would be overspecced for the load and typically unburdened.

If I understand correctly, a trio cluster of this server would sufficiently serve ~200 agents, assuming a reasonably "normal" load (no 20:1 dialing ratios), and higher specced servers would serve more agents with some degree of diminishing returns. At that point, it's most reasonable to add another pair of DB/Telephony servers to continue adding agents.

That being said, are there more specific recommendations for buying servers specifically for ViciDial loads? Are the recommended specs close to the "falloff" point for diminishing returns or is there a better sweet spot? Obviously, the server I linked is not very good or expensive - it just happens to match the spec sheet closely. I'm not constrained by budget, I'm just looking for best practices.

5. Bandwidth

My understanding is that the most common codec (g729) will require 20 kbps for each active line. If I have an upload speed of 30 mbps, I calculate my maximum lines by 30 mbps / .02 mbps = 1500ish active calls. Is this correct?

Thank you for reading.
-Rich

[carpenox]

Rich,

1. yes there is levels 1-9 of which 7 8 and 9 are the manager roles. They have certain abilities each. And yes user groups can also limit what level each user has access to.

2. Check out ViciPhone - I havent done it personally outside of vicidial, but in theory that should work. Check out this github: https://github.com/ccabrerar/ViciPhone

3. The first issues, is installation when doing it remotely, not being able to load the .iso to install. I have written a scratch installation for AWS Lightsail or EC2 instances, and it works. But the limits as far as performance was still an issue because of the hi res perl scripts, correct. Offering that as a service from your own dedicated server using a hypervisor would essentially come with the same problems.

4. That server would work good. I use the R210 for a couple different servers and they work fine. The ram is really what you want more of, the rest of the specs aren't as important. I would suggest at least 8gb. SO 32 would be more than enough.

5. Its not as much of the dialing that matters, its the voice being transferred over RTP. For this you need 1.5 to 2mb per agent that is talking to a live person. Each way, upload speed is where this becomes an issue. Transferring your voice data TO the customer. 30mb would allow for about 15 agents.


Hope this helps.

-Nox

[stackboost.io]

Definitely helpful, thank you.

2. Yeah I saw - I believe that's packaged with Vici 9 so I didn't mention it by name.

5. Yowch on the 2mb per agent per line. My plan was to build the cluster here at my home in NYC and colo somewhere after Covid passes. I have a gigabit line but, alas, only 35 upload. Is there any way around this?

[carpenox]

It does but I had to change it to the one on that github link to get it working for me. Perhaps the newest 9.0.3 works better though.

I actually host people now for "work from home " for businesses that have shut there public doors due to covid. I tried to do it the same route you are trying, but I had to actually but dedicated server and host in a data center. I tried every other way but i have a few clients now using my services. Https://www.cyburity.tk

I have at&t and have 100/100mb up and down and still had to go over to data center. But there is around 50 agents total between the 3 offices I host now, which really still works on 100mb but it doesnt leave any room for growth, so i moved my servers to a datacenter. Now each of my servers provides gbit services to my clients.

Nox

[mflorell]

For WebRTC phones we created our own that most of our VICIhost clients use and is free and available for anyone to use on their own systems. Currently there are hundreds of companies with tens of thousands of agents using it every day: https://viciphone.com

As for hardware, we generally don't recommend Dell servers, but if you do choose to use one for a larger database system, we strongly recommend replacing the PERC card with a MegaRAID caching RAID controller.

[stackboost.io]

As for hardware, we generally don't recommend Dell servers, but if you do choose to use one for a larger database system, we strongly recommend replacing the PERC card with a MegaRAID caching RAID controller.

Thank you. I saw some other posts preferring HP - do you agree with that?

As far as dedicated hosts, are there similar recommendations or gotchas to be aware of? I know I need KVM access to be able to install ViciBox, and the hardware is generally a lot newer than the last box I linked.

I'm looking at the following specs from dedicated.com:
E3-1270 | 16GB - 2 x 1TB HDD (4c/8t @ 3.40 GHz)
» Memory: 16GB RAM
» Drive Bay 1: 1TB Enterprise HDD
» Drive Bay 2: 1TB Enterprise HDD
» Add On 1: Software RAID-1

That's with a 1gbps up/down symmetric line.

[mflorell]

Well, HP is certainly better than Dell

We recommend SuperMicro servers, we have hundreds of them and they are extremely reliable.

As for specs for a database server, we'd recommend a MegaRAID card with 4 x SSD drives in a RAID 10 configuration(or 2 in a RAID-1), and the more RAM the better, at least 32GB to start.

For the dialers in your cluster, you can just use multiple single quad-core servers with 8GB RAM and enterprise spindle drives in a software RAID-1