[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and SER

[Nick Hoffman]

On Tue June 20 2006 08:23, Daniel Salama <lists at infoway.net> wrote:
> I have been reading about integrating Asterisk with SER to help
> Asterisk deal with large volume of registrations (mainly). I was
> planning on fronting Asterisk with SER for that purpose. Not that I
> have the traffic at this moment, but because I wanted to get the
> infrastructure in place.
>
> However, my providers are using G711 codec and I offer G711 and G729
> to my clients because they don't have the best broadband service
> available. So, if my clients are talking G729, I suppose I will have
> to always keep Asterisk in the media path so as to do codec
> translation. Is that correct? I was also planning on using SER's
> nathelper, but if Asterisk _HAS_ to be in the media path, there may
> not be a need for SER's nathelper. Is this assumption correct?
>
> If my purpose of using SER is basically to alleviate registration
> load and help route (possibly load balance) traffic among multiple
> Asterisk servers as well as SIP providers, do I really need SER?
> Would you recommend it? Granted, I have been running both Asterisk
> and SER as separate systems for a while and they both seem very
> stable to me.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel


Hi Daniel. How many registrations are you able to achieve per Asterisk 
server at the moment? As you pointed out, one huge benefit of SER is that 
it can handle more registrations than Asterisk. We're talking in the 
thousands here for SER.

Again, as you said, if one of your customers elects to use G.729, their 
call will have to go through Asterisk for transcoding purposes.

Note though that if you send G.729-calls through Asterisk and G.711-calls 
through SER, you'll have to do some extra work to combine the CDRs. Also, 
you'll have to ensure that the Asterisk and SER servers have the exact 
same time (IE: use NTP).

Having dedicated SER boxes can be very effective at reducing the load on 
Asterisk servers. Before implementation though, you have to make sure that 
you have solutions for the wrinkles this modification puts into your 
original design.

Cheers,
-- Nick
e: nick.hoffman at altcall.com
p: +61 7 5591 3588
f: +61 7 5591 6588

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