3000 AGENT SYSTEM

[mattp0479]

Hi,


We are planning on making any were from 1000 to 3000 agent system for a client. I am trying to figure out how many server this will require I am looking at using dell r900 severs they support up 4 cpu so it would be a 16 core system. I would like to only use 3 database severs max. We need to use recording for each line. We will also be using sangoma cpa in the mix of things for amd. We plan on using 5to 8 lines per agent as well. Please let me know what you would recommend for the hardware setup db sever and astericks and db servers needs based on a 16 core xeon server also recommend ram.

[gmcust3]

wow .. This would be Interesting topic to follow...

[mflorell]

You are going to need some serious bandwidth for this, and I don't know of any carrier that will take that volume of predictive dialer traffic(24,000 concurrent calls). Do you have the telco carrier lined up already as well as the internet connection?

As for the hardware, you would do better to go with very high end database servers, and smaller quad-core machines for everything else.

We have implemented 500+ seat systems before and they can require quite a bit of tuning before they are stable at high call volumes.

[mattp0479]

The internet connection will only be for the agent side. If anyone could recommend a good hardware setup. I am trying to avoid using 50 servers and I was looking at using dell 4 cpu servers to get 16 cores. I would like to have 200 to 300 agents per box with recording and use 1 db server per 1500 or 100 agents. Please let me know your thoughts.

[mflorell]

We have never been able to get anywhere close to 300 agents at 8 lines per agent predictive on a single server, even with 16 CPU cores and 32 GB RAM. Your money is much better spent with smaller machines and your system will be much more reliable. Asterisk and ViciDial do not scale linearly, you will not get anywhere near 4x as much functionality out of a single telco server with 4x the resources as you would having 4 separate servers.

Also, we do not recommend Dell because of the poor reliability and high degree of failure of components on those servers.

[williamconley]

Hey! I love dell servers. Lots of clients using them. Stupid expensive to replace what should be "cheap" parts (ie: purchasing a special power supply for a Dell is not cheap), but the servers themselves are very nice. (my 2 cents, but we don't SELL Dell, we build ours ourselves! LOL)

Remember that when you add power to a single server, no matter how you do it ... it's still a single server. We've found that 4 cores is the breakpoint for power vs ROI. Some say it's the 8 core (dual 4 core) Xeons.

But in this regard, I have to bow to Matt, who has significantly more experience than anyone else with multi-server setups (not just a single office experience, or even a couple or a few, but LOTS of offices with multi-server).

[mattp0479]

1.Ok thanks for the feed back. I am assuming a single cpu qc 2.66 4 gig ramis the best setup for the asteriks servers. What is the most agents I can have per box with recording and up to 10 lines each

2. What would be the most agents that can be assigned to a highend server 16 core 128 gig ram ect. I want to be able to have at least 1000 agents use 1 db server and apache.

[mflorell]

Up to 10 lines per agent now? What changed in the last day to make this go up?

At that high of a dial rate I wouldn't recommend going any higher than 20 agents per server, and that would be pushing it.

As for DB servers, if you want to get 1000 agents per DB server then you need to max out the RAM(at least 64GB), have 4x quad-core CPUs and use RAM drives(with actual RAM, using the acard ram drive) because traditional spinning hard drives aren't going to be fast enough, and neither will SSD drives.

[racosta79]

I am following this topic, now I have an idea about server hardware requeriments, but I have a big question.

Which recipe do I have to follow? The official Vicibox Redux Multi Server Setup or the Pound Team Multi Server manual?

The first uses Open Suse and the second use Ubuntu. My question also is why those distros? Why not Centos or Slackware?

Please advice.

[boybawang]

it all depends on preference, me ive been so happy with ubuntu 10.04 or ubuntu 8.04 custom distro, I already have more than a hundred ubuntu servers running in my clients data center in devonshire, and a few dozens in LA so far ubuntu server works well for me without any issues. That is just me though

[racosta79]

I see, but I was dissapointed with Open Suse and Ubuntu and I think Centos is more "professional"... BUT the Vicidial Wiki MultiServer says:
"WARNING: Before you start doing this install
The Vicidial Team has seen a number of problems with Redhat/Fedora/CentOS based systems running vicidial and does genreally NOT RECOMMEND using those for Vicidial.
Beside of this this is a great start to get a testing system setup!"

Why does Vicidial uses Open Suse (very bad networking management) and Ubuntu (very heavy with memory usage)?

[mflorell]

OpenSuSE is much more stable than CentOS, and without all of those horrible security issues that CentOS has(there have been some high-profile hacks of websites in the last few months because of this).

OpenSuSE is commercially supported by he same people that support SuSE Enterprise(unlike CentOS), and once you get use to using "yast" you will find it a very powerful and reliable management utility.

We have used OpenSuSE for several years now and I was initially hesistant to switch, but I am very glad that we did, it has made managing hundreds of servers much easier and it has proven itself to us time and time again.

[bryan.kewl]

First of all, sorry for bringing an old thread back... (i was looking for scratch installation experiences/questions on the forum and this thread popped up)

As for DB servers, if you want to get 1000 agents per DB server then you need to max out the RAM(at least 64GB), have 4x quad-core CPUs and use RAM drives(with actual RAM, using the acard ram drive) because traditional spinning hard drives aren't going to be fast enough, and neither will SSD drives.

The CPUs have changed alot in past 20months, and some of the recent processors like i7-3990k is competing with most of the 2x, 4x quad cores of the 2010-2011 era and also support 64GB RAM. Do you think i7-3990k with 64GB ram and SSD RAID1 can support the load? I don't have much experience with asterisk / vicidial, but have been managing servers for web, db for almost a decade. and I have seen some amazing performance from the latest CPUs, which I wasn't expecting couple of years back. At the time of matt's post we had ViciBox 3.1.5 (SVN v.2.4-295 build 110103-1135) and now the stable is 3.1.14 so I that the db load hasn't increased much because there wasn't any major changes in the overall structure.