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 very large or non-standard systems. For specifics, please consult your vendor.

  • Test and demo machines: Any modern server PC with 4GB or more RAM.
  • Single machine systems: 2 processor cores, 4GB RAM, 2 disks of 40GB or more in RAID1.
  • Database machines for systems below 1000 concurrent calls: 4 or more processor cores, 16GB or more RAM, 4 disks of 120GB or more in 2 RAID1 pairs. One pair is for the operating system, and the other for the database. Database machines are normally RAM and disk bound, so use plenty of RAM and the fastest affordable disks.
  • Database machines for systems of 1000 concurrent calls and above: 8 or more processor cores, 32GB or more RAM, 6 disks of 120GB or more in 3 RAID1 pairs. One pair is for the operating system, one pair for database storage, and one for logs. Database machines are normally RAM and disk bound, so use plenty of RAM and the fastest affordable disks.
  • NFS machines: 4 or more processor cores, 16GB or more RAM, 4 disks of 120GB or more in 2 RAID1 pairs. One pair is for the operating system, and the other for the file storage. NFS machines are normally disk bound, so the fastest affordable disks should be used. Having more RAM also helps.
  • Kamailio machines: 4 or more processor cores, 8GB RAM, 2 disks of 40GB or more in RAID1. Disk performance is not critical.
  • Asterisk machines: 4 or more processor cores, 4GB RAM, 2 disks of 40GB or more in RAID1. Asterisk machines are normally CPU bound, so if budget allows add more and faster processor cores. 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.
  • The easiest ways to increase the scalability of large clusters are to tune MySQL and to add more RAM to 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.
  • For very large or busy systems, RAID10 can be used to increase disk performance on the database and NFS machines. Due to the complexity, please discuss this with your vendor.
  • 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.

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