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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I'm about to receive approval to
design
and deploy an Asterisk-based phone system for my company. I will
immediately have to start writing specifications. I'm working on
the
hardware design and the architecture right now. I'd like a second,
third, fourth, 1,000th opinion.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">800 SIP phones. All will be G.722. I
expect 200 concurrent calls, with 20% leaving to the outside
world.
There will be another 200 analog lines that will for the time
being
remain on the TDM PBX switch they reside on, and will be whittled
down and converted to SIP as time and attrition allows. These are
primarily fax machines and conference "spider" phones.
Those are included in my 200 concurrent calls number. I'm looking
to
get as close to 5-9's reliability as I can, with 4-9's mandatory.
Proper power filtering and backup is already available.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Here's what I'm thinking for the
architecture:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Server 1: PRI Gateway 1 - Support 2
outside PRI trunks for local and long distance, plus a third PRI
connecting to the existing TDM PBX.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Server 2: PRI Gateway 2 - Support 1
PRI
trunk for local and long distance with room for another, plus a
second PRI connecting to the existing TDM PBX.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Reason for two PRI Gateways is for
redundancy and fail-over, but processor capabilities is a concern.
I
expect in about two years I'll be ready to decommission the TDM
PBX, but will be left with about 80 Analog lines across the
multiple
buildings on my campus. I expect I'll end up purchasing channel
banks
to support the remaining analog lines, and distribute across the
campus using existing copper plant.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Server 3: Asterisk Master Server</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Server 4: Asterisk Slave Server</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I'm considering a clustered
environment, but I believe a fail-over solution would be easier to
implement in the short term. This means each system needs to
handle
all traffic by itself. These servers will be used for Asterisk and
Voice-mail. Conferencing will be enabled, but I'm not considering
it
in the build. If I see conferencing becoming a factor, I will
build
another server and offload that service.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Server 5: Boot Server - DHCP, RADIUS,
SNTP, DNS, LDAP, FTP, HTTPS, SNMP, etc... <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">This service will provide the phone
network all the basic services. This is a stand-alone phone
network
primarily because it would be too costly to upgrade the entire
data
network to support both voice and data. The phone network will not
initially have Internet Access. This server will be the server all
the phones talk to for pulling their configs.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm considering a second Boot Server
for redundancy, but since the phones should store their configs,
I'm
not seeing this as horribly critical. Am I smoking something?<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br>
Finally, I'll have a Windows-based
workstation that will be used to remote into all the services, for
administration, etc...</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I need to plan to use FreePBX on all
Asterisk Servers, but I don't intend to install it until I'm in
regular MAC maintenance mode.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have no plans at this time to build
out any databases. I just plan to use whatever Asterisk has. If it
ever comes to that, I would make those separate servers as well.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My goal is to build Asterisk Servers
and PRI Gateways capable of supporting 150% of what I anticipate,
which would come out to 300 concurrent calls. Again, all phones
will
use G.722. The PRI Gateway servers will do the heavy lifting of
converting G.711 traffic from the PRIs to G722, and connect to the
Asterisk Servers via IAX2 trunk.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's my intention to build each
server
myself with high-quality off the shelf components. I'd like all
servers to be as close to identical as possible, as I intend to
keep
spares on hand to facilitate quick repair and minimize downtime.
I'm
considering RAID 1 + 0 (mirrored and stripped drives) for all
servers. I am considering dual redundant power supplies.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For a processor, I'm currently
looking at the i7-3770K @ 3.5GHz or very similar. Its Passmark
compares to the Xeon E5-2630 @ 2.3GHz, but is half the price.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have no idea what amount of memory
to
consider, so I am thinking 8GB per machine.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">PCI-E is what I plan for all the
cards.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Debian is the Linux flavor<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A new network will be deployed using
PoE layer-2 managed switches. Battery backup capable of providing
8 hours will be installed as required. There will be multiple
VLANs in the network as I have multiple dissimilar offices I need
to keep separated from each other. We will also have 802.11 SIP
phones, and will be deploying a campus-wide WiFi network used only
by the phone system. Yes, I crunched the numbers. This will be
significantly cheaper than upgrading the entire existing data
network to support the new phone system. ...and to be quite
honest, I don't trust our network folks, and know adding that
layer of bureaucracy will only negatively impact the customer
experience. I was a network engineer for a top-three telecom
company for many years, so I do have a point of reference to make
those statements. <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">...yes, I am one guy looking to do
all this, with an estimated completion date of the end of 2013.
I'll be building all this out in addition to my normal "phone guy"
job. I've built servers (hardware and software) for 20+ years, but
my Linux Kung Fu is weak. I'll be learning by doing and know
there'll be a lot of extra hours. The boss is good about training,
so I hope I can get into a good Linux Admin class in addition to
dCAP.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br>
So tear it up! What do you think? Does the CPU have the oomph?
What am I missing? What am I overkilling? What would Brian Boitano
do?<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I appreciate any feedback, and thanks
in advance.<br>
</p>
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