Hardware Selection

For a small switch, the demands on system resources are not large. As one reference notes, "If you have less than five simultaneous conversations going on at once, pretty much any hardware will work with Asterisk." The main concerns are reliability, power consumption, cooling and the number of PCI slots available for installation of line cards, etc.

If you have available an older AT motherboard with a 1GHz Intel processor that can accomodate 512MB to 1GB of memory, has a built-in NIC and possibly VGA support (although why a telephone switch needs a video display may be a question that warrants further thought -- see Going Headless, below), and has six PCI slots, you may have a winner. The number of possibilites are endless. These links will take you to several sites that address how to make the choice:

     http://www.asterisk.name/asterisk/0596009623/asterisk-chp-2-sect-1.html
     http://asteriskglobe.blogspot.com/2008/06/hardware-recommendations.html
     http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+hardware

These install notes assume that you'll be using a RAID controller, with two disks, in a mirrored array configuration. We like the 3Ware RAID controllers. The Escalade 7006-2 RAID controllers are readily available on the various auction sites for very little money (and there's nothing wrong with a couple of top-end IDE drives [e.g. 80GB] in this system).