Re: Hardware
ndraves said:
Thanks.
To use VoIP service, would the server need to have two NICs, one connected to the Internet (probably behind a firewall / router) and one connected to the switch which has the phones?
Depends what Network topology you are using. I would keep things as simple as possible. Internet will go through Router/Nat device, switch, connect 1 port to PC that has 3CX PBX server on it (1 NIC card is enough). Connect the SIP phones, Pc's with soft phones or ATA's to the switch. Finally connect the Gateway (Voip Gateway) for PSTN network access to the switch. And you are done.
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Rob - Iwould agree with you to install the pbx on server 2003. You can always disable the services that you dont need.
q1) - Since its based on Apache, the 10 connection limit of windows XP does not come into effect.
q2) - There isn't actually. The strength and specs of the machine do not only depend just on the amount of users that connect to the PBX.
You can have as many extensions as you like really. The two real issues (bottlenecks) are how many concurrent calls you are going to have and how many Call Assistants you intend to connect. Without using CA then the system will easily scale beyond 1000 extensions. Each call will cost you a few hundred of K of memory. On a basic server (x2 ~2194 Mhz AMD Processors) you won't even see the CPU budge unless you start placing calls 10 at a time (and by "at a time" I mean in the same second). Calls that use MediaServer are more costy depending on what codec you use. On the other hand Call assistant is currently a bit bulky since the CA Server is executes on PHP. Each connected CA will cost you 8MB of RAM and each time someone connects such a processor (x2 ~2194 Mhz AMD Processors) will take up about 8% CPU time. Beyond about 150 connected CAs you will start noticing a lag in the CA notifications.
At this point you have to upgrade of course. I do not actually see the point in having a pc in 2007 with a 10GB harddisk only
( You should know that currently we have a hard coded limit for a maximum of 250 extentions in MS i.e. 125 concurrent calls. It sounds small but it's actually quite a lot of UDP packets that need to be shuffled and analysed (DTMF etc) in a timely fashion. In reality you can surpass that limit but users will experience difficulties when transfering to extensions bound to media server, voip provider lines or Voice Mail.
q3) - To backup you can perform a simple backup from inside the 3CX console managment. That backup is enough. Backup and restore. You do not need to stay stopping services and restart services.