Voicemail on a Network share? Storage Projections?

We avoid the storage issue by simply e-mailing the voicemail to the owner of the extension (and having Asterisk delete it) thereby side-stepping the storage issue on the Asterisk system and shoving it off to our Exchange server.

That being said if you don't monkey with anything Asterisk saves the VMs in GSM, 8kHz, mono at a 13kbps bit rate. You can calculate out storage requirements from there based on anticipated number of messages and average message length. In practice, I see a 60 second VM takes about 100K ~ 110K on disk.

As far as moving the location I know you can specify where the VMs get saved in one of the config files so maybe you can do a Samba or NFS mount point and save to that location. My concern would be that losing the connection would down the VM system completely. Maybe a better idea would be to cron a script that copies the VMs off the local box and deletes them at some interval. That way if the NAS comes up missing (bad network switch anyone?) callers can still record messages.

There is also an option for saving messages to an ODBC database. I've never done it but I do know it takes rebuilding Asterisk against unixODBC to enable the functionality. You could then push them out to a SQL or MySQL server that mounts your storage via iSCSI or something like that.

Jason

Jason

One other option that will not involve ODBC or Asterisk Real Time is to use the IMAP options. This stores the voice mails in an external server. It does not have to be a mail server just set it up to only server the Asterisk box.