MTE User Questionare

1) approx 400 right now on the MTE server

2) hosted pbx, some residential but not much. residential fall within a single tenant for a rate center

3) i use a sip proxy and never allow reinvites

4) endpoints?

5) I use PRI's to asterisk gateway devices and IAX2 to my MTE box

6) not specific to asterisk, the MTE box is running as a Xen guest domain so that hardware failure doesnt cause prolonged down time. I can bring up the guest domain on a few clustered xen hosts.

Thanks Erik,

Must not be alot of MTE users out there.

Cheers,

Chris A

Sorry I didn't answer before now.

1) How many registrations are you currently using?

We have about 130 on one server.

2) Are you deploying for hosted pbx or residential services?

Hosted PBX for small businesses

3) If hosted, how are you handling media between 2 devices behind the same a natted firewall?

No reinvites so far, and we use Edgemarc 4500 routers which have a built in sip proxy. We're investigating the possibility of allowing reinvites where we have 4500s. Our vendor says it will work, but I haven't gotten comfortable with it.

4) What endpoints have you been sucessful using?

Predominantly Polycom. We have a customer with Aastra. We are currently playing with a Linksys, 3COM, and Polycom wifi phone. None of them are ready for prime time in my opinion.

5) Are you using SIP trunking or PSTN (PRI's)?

SIP trunking.

6) Are you using any form of clustering, if so what?

None. We have a standby server in another city for fail over capability.

Dan

1) How many registrations are you currently using?

Just about 300 users

2) Are you deploying for hosted pbx or residential services?

98% small medium business 2% residential

3) If hosted, how are you handling media between 2 devices behind the same a natted firewall?

Sip proxy only

4) What endpoints have you been sucessful using?

90% Linksys SPA 941 / 942 / 962 – ATA 1000 / 2000 / PAP2P and 2101

10% Polycom and snom

5) Are you using SIP trunking or PSTN (PRI's)?

Sip only

6) Are you using any form of clustering, if so what?

media gateway directing DIDs to the VoIP Servers, working on clustering for complete failover

George

George are you using SMG?

Erik,

Sorry.. SMG ..?

you asking out about media gate way..? SER

George

sangoma media gateway.. to handle one SS7 and a large number of trunk lines.

Hi Guys, Sorry for answer late, but here are my answers:

1) How many registrations are you currently using?

About 500

2) Are you deploying for hosted pbx or residential services?

99% Hosted for small and medium bussinees. Now couple of callcenters wanting for us a SIP Trunk.

3) If hosted, how are you handling media between 2 devices behind the same a natted firewall?

No reinvites. That way all the traffic goes to us so we can measure it.

4) What endpoints have you been sucessful using?

Polycom and Lynksys.

5) Are you using SIP trunking or PSTN (PRI's)?

Both.

6) Are you using any form of clustering, if so what?

Not yet.

Daniel Bendersky

Director de Operaciones y Tecnología

dbenders@netline.cl

http://www.netline.cl

Hi Erik

do you need to have licence for every XEN host in cluster? How does the licencing work? Is the licence assigned to hardware?

Peter

I had to abandon using asterisk as a xen guest. Eventually it reached a point where disk I/O applications and transcoding was suffering. It started with problems playing the recordings, messages, music on hold, and then started affecting conference rooms.

While the idea seemed like a good one, and initial testing seemed fine; 6 months of actual use the problems began creeping in and each guest domain was producing far less capacity than a stand-alone machine. On paper it seemed like the perfect high availability solution.

1) How many registrations are you currently using?

400

2) Are you deploying for hosted pbx or residential services?

both

3) If hosted, how are you handling media between 2 devices behind the same a natted firewall?

nothing special, although reinvites are disabled

4) What endpoints have you been sucessful using?

Mostly all Linksys/Cisco with a couple customers using Polycom and one using GrandStream. Handful of users are also using soft phones - most are X-Lite.

5) Are you using SIP trunking or PSTN (PRI's)?

Using Verizon's SIP Gateway service exclusively

6) Are you using any form of clustering, if so what?

none at this time, although we do have another server that could be brought online as a replacement in about an hour or less.

Hi Erik,

About your experience with Asterisk as a Xen Guest,

How many Asterisk Guest were in each Xen server?

THanks

JCM

the xen concept did not scale the way I had hoped. After 9 months we started experiencing a timing issue that appeared when voicemail was played back, ivr recordings were played and conference rooms used. Up until that point things seemed great. There just came a point at which a combination of load, updates, runtimes all impacted the xen concept. Even with a single guest domain on the server the issue was still present.

Hi Erick,

currently we have an asterisk as the only guest in a xen enviroment with a few customers and it works ok, that's why my interest in your experience.

you are using ztdummy for timming in the XenGuest? or with a zaptel interface?

in what percentaje decreased the performance compared to a stand-alone machine?

thanks

JCM.

I got no where even close to the 10,000 handsets that a stand-alone MTE build is capable of handling.

How are you guys handling media from 2 endpoints behind the same natted firewall?

Also for anyone disabling canreinvites are you not seeing heavy traffic through your Server?

For transcoding is anyone using the Digium G.720 card or are you just buying the licenses and letting your server do the work?

Thanks,

Chris A

I'm considering something like http://www.openqrm.com/ for servers (asterisk) that would benefit greatly from running on the bare metal. With an NFS backend like http://www.openfiler.com/ configured with failover and a couple of spare servers, you could have an HA solution almost as flexible as a virtual one - without being virtual :-) More over you can mix openqrm with a virtual environment - it doesn't care if the servers are physical or virtual (be it vmware, xen, etc. - as long it can boot from dhcp/nfs). Say you need to deploy a new MTE - just start it as a virtual server and add tenants. When load increases, reboot it on a physical server. Also consider that you can boot a toasted physical server as a virtual one - sound may be crappy, but at least you can make calls. The only problem is the TL license, which is glued to the MAC.

Note: I have not tested or even tried openqrm. There might be obstacles that would render the outlined solution useless.

/Ole

If MTE supported the ability to write to a database rather than updating the .conf HA would probably be a little easier.

Thanks,

Chris

you still have to HA the database =). Plus if everything was in the database TL would lose 90% of its allure (ability to write customized 3rd party integration). Switchvox cant provide that, trixbox really cant provide that either. I have written integration into IVR's for insurance companies verifying membership eligibility; ive written routes that look up NPANXX of calling party and direct the call to the correct call center etc. None of this can be done with switchvox.

as far as easier, a file or a database can HA just as easy. One lesser expensive method is using a replicating block device for your file system (such as drbd). However, this requires some experience because this technology needs certain features to work well (jumbo frames of 9000 mtu, write-back cache enabled raid cards, etc). There are a few other pitfals that have to be programmed around.

If I were to design a turn-key pair of machines and network switch that give you HA MTE; is this something people would be interested in paying for? The cost would obviously be substantially more expensive than just a cd-rom and a thirdlane license.

Erik,

I would be interested if it was done in conjunction with Thirdlane.

I would not want to be in a situation that saw the product dead end.

-Matt

not sure I understand the question

Matt, in my opinion I would rethink your last statement about TL. I know more than a few people, including myself, who cannot for the life of me, get in touch with TL. How many people had issues where they had a server die and could not get a replacement license for five, six, seven days? That is not acceptable, period. I don't know what the issue is, but I know a few people who are now looking for alternatives. I won't say who it is, but I know that even TL's biggest customer cannot get a response anymore. As much as I think that TL has a first rate product and the best interface for Asterisk hands down, any solutions I use at this point will have to come from somewhere other than here. I do not have any other choice. Some people may disagree with this, but thats OK.

Regards;

FSD

I have never experienced that myself. I feel for the folks trying to get a key for a few days, does a MAC address spoof work? - http://bit.ly/neC7H That might work in a pinch while waiting for a new key.

If you back up the /etc/asterisk directory, you should be able to get things working like they were.

One thing to consider, we negotiated a deal with Alex for live server, hot backup, and setup licences, it was a lot more than a single license, but a lot less than three licenses.

I hope everything is well with Alex, he seems like a hard worker.

Let me know what you come across, mdarnell@gmail.com, I am always looking for the latest and greatest.

-Matt

as far as licenses, my company can issue a temporary 30 day license in a pinch to get you working until a permanent replacement can be configured and issued. For all other support we are a full pbx manager support shop. Support can be obtained by my company also. We have a call center that already mans the phones mon-fri 830am to 9pm EST as well as weekend support hours.

We run multiple MTE instances (about 600 peers)

All Hosted PBX

Both boxes are not available from the internet, so we do not use NAT

Cisco 9741/9741/9760/9761/9712

Thomson ST2030

Grandstream

SNOM

All lines are SIP or IAX (we have our own SIP gateways)

We run SYN3 as a cluster

1) How many registrations are you currently using?

Currently 400, migrating another 200-300 over in the next 2 months

2) Are you deploying for hosted pbx or residential services?

Hosted PBX for small/medium business, call center (predictive/preview dialing), etc.

3) If hosted, how are you handling media between 2 devices behind the same a natted firewall?

nothing special, no reinvites

4) What endpoints have you been sucessful using?

70% Aastra, 15% softphone (xlite/eyeBeam), 10% Polycom, 5% other (linksys, thomson, etc)

5) Are you using SIP trunking or PSTN (PRI's)?

SIP trunking only

6) Are you using any form of clustering, if so what?

on my hot list, I have the hardware, still looking for the right solution

I've only been at this a few weeks so much of what is already understood is foreign to me>> I have a model in my mind but all the replys here make it seem intangible.

I was testing the software using Virtual PC and realized the timing issue was causing my MOH and IVR's to garble but calls work fine using ATA's (Handytone 286) and softphones X-lite. I wasn't planning to go live with this anyway so i'm glad to find this discussion before i spent 6 months working out the bugs just to realize loss of scalability. Thanks for that....

Anyway I'm wondering why no one targets residential. If you can register 10000 handsets on one box why not? Is it not possible to buy Sip trunks at about $6 apiece and DID's for $1 and can't you run about 100 residential customers on 20 Sips give the customer a $20 ATA and sit back and collect???? Please feel free to call me an idiot and punch all the holes in this you can its the fastest way for me to learn. Thanks in advance.

well because you cannot buy sip trunks at $6 at the wholesale level. At the wholesale level your buying bulk origination and termination which is a per minute charge. Providers that sell _those_ kind of deals monitor usage and bill for overages (often their eula mentions terminating service for abuse). This means that for every number you buy for a customer you have to set up a trunk to the provider so that company A's usage doesn't run up penalties for you when company B is way underutilized. This of course is a major freakin headache for you and cuts the number of customers by more than half because what would have been a simple trunk to your provider is now a fluster cluck of trunks. To compound the issue more, multiple trunks set up to the exact same IP when proxy authentication is not used results in all incoming calls from that ip showing up as coming from the FIRST listed trunk in sip.conf for that peer even if it were supposed to be otherwise. This really can confuse you when looking at the calls coming in.

Another reason why some people do not mess with residential is profit margins are lower, they tend to run up more LD (since its *free*). Your support load is a lot higher doing residential because your handset to technician ratio is around 1:1. For every technician calling with a problem they are solving issues with just 1 ata and the technical skill of that caller can be a lot less technical than a business (though this is not always the case).

My company was an ISP 10 years before it became an ITSP and we always specialized in business connectivity. We would not turn down residential service but we did not spend much energy trying to obtain it. Residents are motivated by different values that commerical customers. Its impossible to compete with price when my wholesale on the DSL loop (in addition to the required analog service to get said DSL) exceeds the telephone companies price to the same customer for DSL loop and internet combined. Where we CAN compete is with customer service and with the quality of the service we provide. You know what its like when you call this big multinational corporations with a problem and they act as if they either dont care or cant be bothered to solve your issue either directly or sending you to some idiot that knows even less than you do who tells you to reboot your computer when you have a friggen red alarm on your t1.

Eric,

We are evaluating HA architectures and trying to understand what's being provided on the latest TL distribution. We're considering things like DRBD and understand that's a part of the new HA piece in T.L. but are a little worried as it's not cake to implement and manage as you mention above. it would also conceivably require us to have 5 servers Prod 1/ Prod2 Dev1/Dev2 and Remote Failover1 which gets kind of pricey without some kind of deal from Alex. As you also point out, just the HA piece alone, done well, might exceed the cost of the server license.

Latest thoughts?
thanks
Devin

well there is no doubt that building a scalable HA architecture is costly. This is true for any application whether its a cluster of web servers or some sort of voice implementation. I have always used the visualization: Picture a hyperbolic curve where the horizontal axis is uptime reliability and the vertical axis is cost. Every time you add a 9 to that decimal place (example: 99.999%) your additional costs to add that new 9 is going to be exponentially more expensive than the previous 9. This is true almost universally in all aspects of engineering. The more redundancy you want to weave into the solution the exponentially higher the cost.

No one said becoming a phone company was cheap. Wait till you realize you have to hire an attorney to carefully fill out all the paperwork for the FCC for their annual and quarterly reports. HA is not a requirement to start selling services. Its just something some people do to hedge against hardware failure. You have to decide what risks you are going to chance and which ones you're going to hedge against. There's more hidden costs in running an ITSP in dealing with legal paperwork than there is in licensing and hardware some years.

HA is also merely one strategy I have seen people deploy. Instead of buying two $6k servers to run on MTE with aspirations of 1000 tenants, some people choose to use $2k servers and have a few of these MTE platforms with only a 100 customers and 400 phones on each and keeping a spare server in a 1hr-to-production state. In that scenario a failure of hardware only affects a percentage of their customers and their spare hardware is installed just up to the point where the different MTE boxes are unique, so as to restore from the backup of the dead MTE and be live again within an hour. No matter what solution you go with, you still need to buy quality hardware with hardware redundancies. Redundant power supplies, hardware raid-1 (real controller not fakeraid like an I-CH8 northbridge), an extra drive setup as a hot spare.

Be glad you aren't starting a business in manufacturing. Those are expensive startup costs.

Erik,

Above you asked, "If I were to design a turn-key pair of machines and network switch that give you HA MTE; is this something people would be interested in paying for? The cost would obviously be substantially more expensive than just a cd-rom and a thirdlane license."

Is it your understanding that Alex now has software to support a para-HA or something near it built into T.L.? If not, yes, I would be interested in it. Are you interested in providing it?

Do you have a good telco lawyer familiar with the filings we need to do and/or a website/article where I can see the list of things required? I'm only familiar with 499A.

Thanks, by the way for all your great answers, posts and contributions on this forum.

thanks,
Devin

theres the 499A, 499Q, CPNI, CAELA (spelling?), and some other thing I had to register at least once answering a bunch of questions.

Is it your understanding that Alex now has software to support a para-HA or something near it built into T.L.? If not, yes, I would be interested in it. Are you interested in providing it?

the intent with this is to provide a rudimentary bare bones HA solution that works, but may not be nearly as savvy as a custom built cluster. Its a separate license key entirely to unlock the features that create everything. The only preliminary work that gets performed is creating unpartitioned space, creating the drbd abstraction layer, and installing a filesystem on top of this.