Hardware recommendations

Every Enswitch customer has different goals for their system, both in terms of features used and system sizing. Therefore these recommendations are advice only. In general these specifications will provide a good scalable system without excessive cost; small or lightly used systems can be lower specifications. They may be inadequate for larger or non-standard systems. For specifics, please consult your vendor.

  • Test and demo machines: Any Pentium 4, Xeon, or similar, with 2GB or more RAM.
  • Single machine systems: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 2 SATA or IDE disks of 40GB or more in RAID1.
  • Database machines for systems below 1000 concurrent calls: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 4 SAS or SCSI of 120GB or more hard disks in 2 RAID1 pairs. One pair is for the operating system, and the other for the database or file storage.
  • Database machines for systems of 1000 concurrent calls and above: Quad Xeon or Pentium 4, 8GB or more RAM, 6 SAS or SCSI hard disks of 120GB or more in 3 RAID1 pairs. One pair is for the operating system, one pair for database storage, and one for database transaction logs.
  • NFS machines: Same as database machines.
  • OpenSIPS/OpenSER machines: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 2 SATA or IDE disks of 40GB or more in RAID1 (disk performance is not critical).
  • Asterisk machines: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, 2 SATA or IDE disks of 40GB or more in RAID1 (disk performance is not critical).

Notes:

  • The database machines will be the long term limit on how many users the system can support, so if on a budget, spend it on the database servers.
  • 1 dual core processor is an acceptable substitute for dual processors; likewise 2 dual core processors are an acceptable substitute for quad processors, and so on.
  • Hardware RAID controllers are preferred for the RAID1 pairs for performance.
  • If using NFS, please disable Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) on the ethernet switch. Not doing so may lead to the NFS mounts failing to start automatically after rebooting NFS clients. STP is enabled by default on Cisco switches.