System Requirements Question

[IT_Ape]

Hey all, First time posting, all though other post have been really helpful in learning Vicidial. I have setup a test machine and installed vicidial, reason being is new Job and their Vicidial system is extremely old and extremely cluttered with crap after like 5 IT Admins gone thru them over 7 years. So I want to rebuild the machine, right now we have 2 systems running asterisk with vicidial( I believe in a cluster, not 100% though) and these are Vicidial version VERSION: 2.0.4-119 BUILD: 71125-1751 , are running on a Dell PowerEdge SC1425 http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/sc1425_specs.pdf with 4 gb of ram , and currently setup with a seperate Database Server. We have anywhere from about 25-40 agents making outbound calls.

My question is even though the Vicidial Requirements state that if you have more than 10 agents you should have a separate database& web server, I assume that is with there "All-In-One Server" requirements (Quad Core,4Gb RAM, 70GB HDD,10/100). I want to use a Dell 2950 That is not being used (2x E5410 2.3Ghz(total of 8 cores),32 GB of RAM and 4 Gigabit NIC's). Should I be able to use this server as an All_In_ONE server for the amount of agents I Have? or still use separate servers ?

Thanks For any advice and Help

[williamconley]

Welcome to the party!

1) Get yourself a nice vSphere server and/or VMware/Virtualbox instance on your desktop (if you don't have a spare 2 core or above box laying around). Install Vicibox 10 times in a virtual server from beginning to end. All the way, inbound, outbound, transfers, be sure everything works. When you're done, you will have Zero fear of installation (although it's even better if you go all the way and build a cluster). Note that while you can not use this in production above a couple phone calls and one agent ... it's perfect for Losing the Fear and for Development (you now have a place to try crap on the real system when you finish building it out!)

2) The "Rule of Thumb" is 25 agents per server. There is no adjustment up or down that can be accurately calculated because each user's experience is different. What you consider normal will turn out to use more or less power than what others consider normal. That being said: If I were in your position, I would build it out and try 40 agents ... BUT: Be prepared to turn off AMD, Surveys, Call Recordings, and use only ulaw for all calls to maximize the system capacity. And seriously consider putting a second server online as soon as possible. For instance: Once your new server is "online and happy", you could rebuild any one of the old servers as a "Dialer Only" or "Web only" for this new system, turning it into a cluster. Removing any single role from that Dell 2950 may enable it to handle the rest of the load nicely and re-enable anything you had to turn off when you exceeded capacity.

3) When you do switch over, you should be prepared to switch back if there's a challenge on the new server. We've managed this for some well-thought-out-and-planned implementations in the past, and even gone so far as to build a "go get the data from the old cluster" script so that each time they want to try, they have the data from the prior system for a quick test to see if everything is perfect. If not, switch back to the old one and try again after lunch (or tomorrow). This would even include upgrading the old data to the new system and modifying DNS entries so the agents do not have to make ANY changes in their systems at all (Just wait for DNS to propagate and switch/switchback is done).