Greg Brown wrote:
P-IV? Is that enough? Or Dual Xeon? SCSI subsystem... how much RAM? 2 gig? 4 gig? What kind? 10k RPM disks, or greater? technology is starting to sound expensive. :)
Jon's recommendations are all well and good for a system which is going to handle any reasonable volume of calls. Anything that's a dedicated PBX needs careful care and feeding in terms of all manner of IO. For example, one Digium T1 card will consistently generate 1000 interrupts every second, and servicing those interrupts promptly is required for consistent call handling. Unmasking the interrupts on your hard drives, ensuring UDMA transfers, etc, etc, etc are all requirements for a heavily loaded PBX. By contrast, my box at home does lots of other tasks, and occasionally handles calling functions. It's a P4 2.4Ghz with 1G of RAM and a pair of 250G IDE disks, but it's essentially never doing anything taxing. It services half a dozen phones, 3 persistent IAX tunnels, and maybe 10 calls per day, tops. :)
You can find lots of information at http://www.voip-info.org/ about sizing up machine requirements for Asterisk. The big thing that will consume processor time is transcoding, going between G.729 and G.711 for 5 to 10 concurrent connections, for example, could start to really chew up some processing time. If you're not transcoding (which most regular PBXes won't), it's mostly about keeping your IO moving along at a nice clip. My best suggestion would be to give it a try on what ever you have lying around, and if you run into problems, post about those specific problems and we can help you to isolate what the source of the problem is. Or provide more info about what you want to use the PBX for and perhaps we can help you formulate better hardware requirements.
Happy calling! Aaron S. Joyner
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