[asterisk-users] Hardware suggestions

[Gordon Henderson]

On Thu, 19 Mar 2009, Mike wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I`m looking for reliable and redundant hardware for Asterisk.  I`ve been
> leaning towards buying one of these (HP 360 G5 with everything as redundant
> as possible), which I know will be good enough for a few months before
> needing to upgrade:
>
> http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241
> 475-1121486.html

Hm. Expensive, but ...

> Questions:
>
> 1) Any reason why I shouldn't? (bad past experience with HP hardware and
> Asterisk for example)
>
> 2) Should I go Quad core or Dual-core?  I will certainly go with two
> processors (to start, simply for redundancy).

xxx-CORE. Both cores in the same physical chip. The chances of one failing 
and the other not... slim, I reckon, and while Linux does have support for 
hot-plug CPUs, I doubt it's intended to work at the chip level like that.

> 3) When installing the OS (CentOS is what I generally use) should I install
> it 64 bits or 32 bits? (does it even matter for Asterisk?)

Use the one you are most familair with.

> I will possibly be running a very little used Apache and FTP server.  The
> only notable thing running with Asterisk will be MySQL for CDR and other
> dialplan data.

The hardware is overkill for that. For that price you can get 2 Atom 
motherboards and run them in Linux HA mode if you want redundancy.

Gordon