[asterisk-users] Hardware suggestions

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

On Thu, 19 Mar 2009, Mike wrote:

>> You can reliably run asterisk on just about any x86 hardware.  You don't
>> mention what kind of stresses you are going to put on it, so your sizing
>> questions are impossible to answer.  How many extensions?  How many
>> simultaneous calls?  Will you be transcoding?  Routing to/from the PSTN?
>> What cards will you be putting in the box?  Some cards don't play nicely
>> together if forced to share interrupts, for example.
>
>
> I wasn't worried about sizing (let's imagine that this is more than enough
> for now and less than I'll need later).  More about whether this was the
> right BRAND more than the right hardware. Does HP make Asterisk friendly
> hardware? I know Dells was problems a few years back.

AFAIK (there's that acronym again :):) ), the Dell issues were related to 
interrupt sharing and multiple PSTN interface cards.  You mention below 
SIP/SIP only, so I wouldn't worry.  The HP should be fine.

>
> As for CPU, the question is mostly one about more GHz or more cores? Dual
> cores are cheaper by GHz. What`s best for Asterisk?

That's actually a decent question.  Anyone have any benchmarks?  It is the 
transcoding that will eat your CPU.  I think with minimal transcoding you 
would have a hard time overloading a 2.4GHz machine before other factors 
came into play.

>
> I am doing only SIP to SIP calls.  Some transcoding (half calls are G711 to
> G729, the other half are G729 both ways).
>
> [snip]
>
>> I'm shooting from the hip here, but I don't think dual CPU gives you
> redundancy.  If one chip fries I am pretty sure the machine will crash.
>
> This was sort of a question disguised as a statement.  Can a CPUs function
> when it's neighbour is fried?
>

Certainly the machine will crash, and I doubt it would boot on one CPU if 
the other is still installed and shorting out its pins :)

I think David is completely correct.  If you want a redundant setup, run 
multiple smaller cheaper machines with a load balancing front end.  Stay 
away from single points of failure.

j


> Mike
>
>
>
>
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