Minimum Hardware requirements for VICIDIAL
"There may be a suggestion, but not a requirement."
VICIDIAL/GoAutoDial runs on a Pendtium 4 machine and also on a Xeon Quad Processor based System.
Depending on the size of your ViciDial Setup you need a different amount of servers with different setups.
Typical setups would be:
10-15 Seat Inbound or Outbound
Dialing up to 30 concurrent Calls at a time.
1 All-in-One Server [Intel Core 2 Duo/AMD Processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD]
1 PRI or VoIP Trunk
Codec : G729
Internet Bandwidth : 1 Mbps 1:1 or 4 Mbps Broadband
Total initial cost under $500
15-30 Seat Outbound or Inbound
Dialing up to 150 channels/lines at a time.
1 All-in-One Server [Xeon Dual Core Processor, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD]
1 PRI or VoIP Trunk
Codec : G729
Internet Bandwidth : 4 Mbps 1:1 or 25 Mbps Broadband
Total initial cost under $1000
30-50 Seat outbound good pickup ratio
Dialing up to 300 concurrent Calls at a time
1 All-in-One Server [Xeon Quadl Core Processor, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD+128GB SSD]
1 Database Server
Codec : G729
Internet Bandwidth : 16 Mbps 1:1 or 100 Mbps Broadband
Total initial cost under $3000
100+ Seat outbound good pickup ratio
Dialing up to 500 concurrent Calls at a time
1 Asterisk Server
1 Database Server
2 Application Servers
1 Archive Server
Codec : G729
Internet Bandwidth : 32 Mbps 1:1
Total initial cost under $6000
Frequently Asked Questions
How many agents can I put on a single (All-In-One) server?
Even so some people will try to sell you single server systems that allow you to put 50 or more agents on them, we seriously can not recommend this.You usually will experience a number of problems, starting with audio problems, slow connections, lost calls, all the way to full system crashes. Due to the high requirements on the PBX and the Database part, those two running on the same server can be a problem to start with. We think that 10 Agents is a safe value for a single server setup. With everything being setup properly, good hardware, no or limited recording and some care in the selection of the component we have seen single Server systems with 40 Agents, this is however not a typical result.
How many Servers do I need?
The Rule of thumb:
Separate Database Server
If you have more then 10 Agents you should run a separate database/application server.
Separate Application Server
If you have more then 3 Dialer Servers in your setup you should have a dedicated application server. Below that the application part can be run on either the Dialer or the Database Server.
Inbound calls
One Server per 50 Agents with short queues. When you expect longer queues, the number of calls in queue plus the number of agents should not be greater than 50 to 75. If calls are spread out evenly the number can be higher if calls are coming in bursts you should make it less.
Outbound manual or assisted List-dialing
As a list dialer (Power dialer) that dials the next number automatically or manually on a one call per Agent basis as soon as the Agents requests the next call to be dialed each server can support around 50 Agents as well. The dialing frequency is usually not that high and there is only one line dialed per agent, this allows for more agents then heavy predictive dialing.
Predictive dialing
Predictive dialing puts a higher load on the dialing servers, for that only about 30 Agents should be put on each server. If the talk-time per call is unusually long (> 3min avg.) you can put more Agents on each server. This is assuming to not use Answering Machine Detection or Text to Speech.
Smart predictive dialing
If you are using Answering Machine Detection, Interactive Voice Response, "press 1 to speak to an agent" or similar techniques your safe number of Agents is at around 25 per server.
How many Agents does Vicidial support at most?
We are not really sure because we did not reach that limit yet. What we however know is that you can cluster over 20 Servers in a single setup without any major problems. And while we are working on the performance of Vicidial that will increase the number of maximum agents as well. If you have to support more than 200 Agents we suggest to work directly with us since we know how to optimize Vicidial best and would like to have more large scale alpha or beta sites. As long as we have that need we might be able to give you speciall rates for that.
Can I run Vicidial on a virtualized Server?
We seriously would not recommend it. Vicidial uses the Server Hardware in a number of areas to its max. Putting Vicidial in a Virtual machine, especially one that has to share resources with other machines makes the system very unstable. Because of that we are sometimes running Vicidial for testing purposes in a virtual machine, we do so, because the virtual machiene setup shows problems way earlier than a regular setup. So if you try to have as many problems as possible, running Vicidial in a virtual machine is the way to go. The only type of virtual setup that seems to make sense in a production environment, is to use it as a hardware abstraction layer on dedicated hardware. There are however even some problems with that.
