Setup 1000 agents in Vicidial?

[tntconsulting]

We are looking to setup Vicidial for 1000 agents.

What would be the hardware requirements? How many servers?

Currently we have a single server utilizing GoAutoDial 2.1CE on 3.4 I7, 8mb RAM, 1tb RAID10.

[mflorell]

Please describe the call handling you will be doing(inbound/outbound/blended) as well as the lines-to-agent ratio

Will there be 1000 concurrent agents on the system at the same time, or just 1000 agent accounts?

[tntconsulting]

Calling would be blended, about 75% Outbound. Lines-to-agents would be 3 or 4, depending on the quality of databases.

We would have 1000 agents logged in at the same time, and possibly would include Virtual agents and/or agents logged in from satellite locations. We will be utilizing 3 or 4 ISPs in the server location.

Our intention is to start with 200 agents, and expand the dialer and servers as needed. Would like to have a solid base to grow off of so that in the future we can reach the 1000 agent requirement.

[mcargile]

Well you will want a web server per 150 agents. Put more agents on it than that and you run the risk of running out of local ports (google "linux local port exhaustion"). This is a limit in the IPv4 specification and not in the hardware. The web servers will work just fine as a single quad core with four gigs of ram and two hard drives in a raid 1.

We recommend only putting 25 agents per dialing server with the same specs as above. More than that and you can have problems. This is also not really a limit of the hardware, but the software. Asterisk has locking issues as the channel counts go up. Putting it on heavier duty hardware does not really fix this.

The big thing is the database. I will tell you this. It will be far more cost effective to build four separate clusters each with their own database than to try and build a single database that can handle 1000 agents.

For 1000 agents I would start off with a quad socket motherboard with quad cores in it, as much RAM as you can put into the motherboard, and an enterprise class solid state solutions like these http://www.fusionio.com/. You might have to upgrade the server from there.

For 250 agents you can use a dual quad core, with 16 gigs of ram, and 4 15k SCSI drives in a RAID10 using a hardware caching Raid controller. We recommend the LSI MegaRaid line (their 3ware line is more suited towards archive servers).

Also I highly recommend buying the "High Performance MySQL" book from O'Reilly (ISBN 978-1-449-31428-6) and reading it. Keep in mind that Vicidial is not compatible with InnoDB while reading it though as they seem to lean towards it heavily.

[tntconsulting]

Thank you for the info.

About the database servers.....I have been reading quite alot this weekend and have this question. If we use a Master/Slave replication setup, is it possible to have the dialers and webservers login to slave machines. If we have 4 slaves, can we split the agents across these machines? Another question would be about clustering 4 database servers and have a Load balance between them. Or would this be opening up a much larger can of worms?

[mflorell]

In master/slave replication with vicidial, the slave servers can only be used for reporting and failover, not for agent screen connections.

Mysql cluster load balancing only works with Innodb, and it does not work well with real-time systems like Vicidial.

[Op3r]

Most important question: are all the 1000 agents on the same campaign? single campaign?

If not, you can definitely make your life easier by just segregating it on per campaign cluster.

That's what I did. It is being used on a 600 seats center. Since I want to have a life, the biggest and verifiable vicidial setup I ran seated 270+ agents with full recording and using g729 logged in to a single campaign. I even managed to have a 1 week vacation and a nightlife that time