VIcidialNow hardware/computer specs

[zeusmaxfield]

What are hardware/computer specs needed for a vicidialnow server?
What is it's capacity? how many agents it can take?

And what's the difference between vicidial and vicidialnow? except for the installations.

[williamconley]

there are no requirements. i have vicidial running on a PII with 386 meg of ram.

capacity depends on hardware and bandwidth and what you are using it for (are you recording? are you broadcasting or do you have live agents? remote agents). it has NO AGENT LIMIT. (ok: No KNOWN agent limit, if you find one, let me know!)

Vicidial is the software. VicidialNOW and ViciBox are installation .iso's that will install an Operating System AND Vicidial (vicidial is the same on both, except for minor version variations as of the moment of release of the .iso). In either case you can upgrade to the lastest version of Vicidial just like if you had done a "scratch" install (which is another method of installation for we "hardcore" vicidialers).

VicidialNOW is by an independent company, specifically for those who want to use CentOS (which is in the Redhat family of Linux) while Vicibox is an installation in Ubuntu. Before VicidialNOW there was very little chance of getting Vicidial into CentOS, however: CentOS and Redhat in general are still NOT officially supported by the Vicidial Community, so any issues relating to those OSs are limited to the VicidialNOW forum and only addressed if they are the result of a VicidialNOW installation. (No generic CentOS installation support is offered officially, as it doesn't work).

Vicibox is on Ubuntu and there are no presently known issues with installing on Ubuntu (especially if you did so with Vicibox!).

I personally use Gentoo, but have recently begun using Vicibox. I also have several customers on VicidialNOW, because they like CentOS.

Clear enough?

[zeusmaxfield]

Hmmm. Is That true? Because we had several installations of vicidial on cent05 and it's working fine until now. The last installation we had is for a 40 seat call center and it has been a year now.

Back to vicidialNOW, What's the recommended hardware/computer specs minimum? Can it handle 20 to 40 seats full recording, outbound calls, no remote agents, with enough bandwith?

How about inbound? 20 to 40 seats?

Also someone told me that the kernel that vicidialNOW is using a 32bit CentOS and that's only for a 2gig RAM Machine and it can't be maximized upto 4gig. How true is this?

Is vicidialNOW recommended for full 30-50 seat call center?

____________________________________________________________

Seeking knowledge. Thanks.

[williamconley]

perhaps you should share your install technique, there have been many attempts, but the vicidialnow folks are the only ones that seemed to "stand and deliver" ... your contribution COULD cause quite a bit of happiness.

32 bit OS cannot address 4G of memory (stops at 3.2G). True for Windows or Linux.

Specs requires a bit more information (search for some threads there have been some calculations issued), but you need to discuss whether you will record all/some/none. Codec, bandwidth available, are agents on same subnet or over internet (what codec are THEY on and also what codec the outbound calls are on), method of timing (ztdummy, x100p clone ...?).

Vicibox/vicidialNOW/Vicidial are all really Vicidial and can handle (as far as I know) ROUGHLY the same load. There will be opinions (in both directions) for slight technical reasons for difference, but they are all vicidial.

if you get at least MySQL off onto another box, you will find a great increase in capacity (and a MySQL box is not very expensive to implement). so if you find yourself nearing capacity as your agent level increases, move mysql.

[zeusmaxfield]

Installng on Cent05 is on another topic another thread/posting.

It's all vicidial ok, that's good news i guess.

But still like the astguiclient scratchinstall where you can know the computer specs,

- Pentium 3 500MHz
- Intel motherboard D815BN
- 256MB PC133 RAM
- 80GB IBM deskstar 7200RPM Hard Drive
- Digium Wildcard Single Span T1 Card T100P
- 2U rackmount case with 250W power supply

Is there any suggestion for vicidialNOW?

If i'm going to use the specs above how many agents can it take? Full recording and everything no issue on bandwith.

____________________________________________________________

Seeking knowledge. Thanks.

[williamconley]

Full recording and everything no issue on bandwith

"and everything"? please be a little more explicit, if there's anything you're leaving out ...
How many "calls per agent". Please remember that Vicidial uses CPU for each phone call to each Prospect in addition to each Agent (so 1:1 dialing will result in a completely different capacity than 4:1 dialing). Also, is the campaign "broadcast (press one, play a recording)"? This also makes a huge difference in capacity. I also see no note regarding codecs (at the asterisk CLI "show translation" will give you the "cost" of each codec in terms of cpu usage relative to ULAW).

that being said, if i had the box you have described (PIII .5G 256M) and were planning a full-recording campaign ... I would expect to get at least two agents on the box with a 2.5:1 dial ratio. I'm not sure if I'd get more than that with reliability.

[gardo]

I'd say you're good up to 3 agents on auto-dialing with full recordings. The hardware on the scratch install wasn't meant for a 20 seater center. Unless you're doing a multi-server setup.

A pretty decent hardware that's good for 20 seats based on our experience is a Core 2 Quad Q6600 or better w/ 4 gig of RAM. Recordings are done on RAM drives and gets transferred to the harddisk on regular intervals. This is to avoid intensive disk IO bottlenecks on the harddisk when doing full recordings.

If you're going for more than 20 seats, better go for a multi-server setup. A comprehensive documentation was also included by Matt in the Astguiclient zip file.

Installng on Cent05 is on another topic another thread/posting.

It's all vicidial ok, that's good news i guess.

But still like the astguiclient scratchinstall where you can know the computer specs,

- Pentium 3 500MHz
- Intel motherboard D815BN
- 256MB PC133 RAM
- 80GB IBM deskstar 7200RPM Hard Drive
- Digium Wildcard Single Span T1 Card T100P
- 2U rackmount case with 250W power supply

Is there any suggestion for vicidialNOW?

If i'm going to use the specs above how many agents can it take? Full recording and everything no issue on bandwith.

____________________________________________________________

Seeking knowledge. Thanks.

[nickriosBOL]

Hey Right now I have 15 agents calling with auto dialing with different campaigns, and 5 more with manual dialing, and 15 with an inbound acct. I have a VicidialNOW server setup, with full recording, FTP enabled and the calling ratio goes from 2.0 to 3.5 sometimes.

My server specs are:
Pentium Core 2 Duo
2Gb DDR II RAM
320 GB SATA Drive (to store the recordings longuer after that i move them to another server)

Right now they all use SIP trunks, but with that setup I have no problems what so ever so far.
Hope it helps you with something.

[Op3r]

Im currently using vicidialnow 1.2 on a 90 seats campaign.

My hardware as follows,

IBM blade server with 16 cores xeon processor (for database) with 16gb memory and lots and lots of hard drive.

6 core2quad servers with 4gb memory and 320 gb hard drive

it will only go down if somebody trips over the cables, or internet/power goes down. or the hard drive is full. I can sleep better for full 8 hours or go out partying while they are on calls

[williamconley]

Get a 1T hard drive (or three as a RAID) and bolt those stupid cables down.

Then come down to Orlando on vacation. I'll get you a nice timeshare for a week. LOL