Max Amount of Calls

You're pushing it, if you're going to be transcoding all those calls. A system with similar specs from voip-info was topping out at about 400 calls. If you don't transcode, you can easily accommodate 1500 or so on that hardware.

Check out:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+dimensioning#Pedaltothemet...

For the best info on this. Oh, and stechnique is correct about the RAM. You're wasting your money with more than 4 GB.

Josh

if you are expecting to do that with freepbx, you are making a Titanic (as in the one that sank). Bigger simply does not = more capacity.

you are better off doing that on 2-3 machines - half the load, half the down time, half the worry, and possibly half the cost by not needing such an extravagant server.

You can build zaptel for 64 bit centos to use more than 4gb (not supported by trixbox), but if i had enough users to justify more than 4gb, i just would not want them to be on a single machine. 500 calls of G729 - will the endpoints be running g729 - if not and you are transcoding that many calls, your server will most likely choke before it even hits 300 calls.

The drives are also going to be a bottle neck, especially if you use RAID5 (RAID1 is faster), if you turn all logging down, and dont plan on any call recording, they may work out. I would move up to SAS drives or move down to less calls/server.

Also keep in mind centos 5 + asterisk 1.4 (soon 1.6) + mysql5... use more resources than previous versions that much of the example data is based on from voip-info.org, note that most of those high capacity systems where only pass-thrus, no termination, and only 3-5 of them are examples of modern systems. More importantly, *if any at all*, *maybe* a small percent of those examples use freepbx.

check out this: http://trixbox.org/wiki/how-big

sounds doable, but whats with all the drive space? call recording? 250/server may still be a bit high for that if you use sata drives with recording. 3 servers may be safer. Build dedicated extension ranges for each server, and then just trunk them together. Make sure all voice prompts and music are encoded in 729 as well.

download prompt packs in 729 - there are a few sites online that have them. when you make custom prompts, buy them from a company that supports 729.