Required hardware by call volume

[Carlos Montemayor]

Considering that all calls would be automatically recorded, what would be the suggested minimum hardware specs to house the Single Tenant Enterprise Solution?  It would be good to know the minimum CPU and RAM (something else?) needed for all the spectrum of simultaneous calls, but in particular I need to know the requirements of following options: 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024 simultaneous calls

[Vodia PBX]

This is a difficult question. It is similar to the question what kind of hardware do I need to handle 100 emails per second... But let me try.

For up to 64 calls I would say pretty much any PC server should be able to handle it unless you steal it from a museum; 128 calls are done by a cheap new server; 256 by a good server; 512 will require a top server; for 1024 you will have to get everything that is possible today, and you have to avoid call recording and transcoding and maybe even SRTP. 

Memory is not as important. 4 GB RAM is enough - you probably don't even get such small servers any more. Same for hard drive unless you want to do massive call recording.

[Carlos Montemayor]

Thanks for tackling the questions. It is something that needs to be address even though we have to understand that there are "caveats" we should consider.

I remember that in its origins, the PBX software, in order to maximize quality, would bind the voice processing to one of the cores of the CPU and would reject calls at certain percentage of CPU usage. Being such the case,  the recommendation use to be to use a double core CPU of the fastest clock available and the problem has been that the tendency for server manufacturing has been lately to increase the number of cores reducing the clock speed. I imagine that the PBX software has evolved and currently does take advantage of the presence of more cores in the CPU. Am I right? If so, which version marked the change?

 

[Vodia PBX]

Yes that is still the case. If you want to "squeeze" more out of a CPU with more cores, you can also run multiple instances on the CPU. Then you can either bind each instance to a different port set (e.g. 5062, 5063) or different IP address. In modern OS it is possible to have multiple IP addresses so that they will occur like separate server instances. If you are using virtualization it will do that for you, but you can also do this directly on the OS similar to a docker image.