VOIP / Surveillance server(s)

[spongeBOB1983]

Hi i live in Australia and soon we will have to disconnect our ADSL2+ service and move to our new NBN internet service, This is a FTTN (fiber to the node) system and we will no longer be able to use the POTS system for PBX calls at the place where i work. As i am the resident tech guy in our small business (6 employees) i have been tasked with working out what hardware/software will be needed to keep us up and running when we change over, i have basically decided to use FreePBX for our what will become VOIP telephone system and possibly iSpy for an ip camera server as we will be upgrading the camera system at the same time. my question is is it possible to run both these packages using unraid on a single machine or should i split them up and have two separate servers? also i am looking for hardware recommendations depending on peoples opinions on system setup. i am not a complete NOOB when it comes to building a pc but over the last 10 years my experience on what hardware should be used on this sort of application has dropped to nothing and i have only built a few basic office computers

[Electronics Wizardy]

Using vms will work fine. Id stay away from unraid due to is bad vm system, and use proxmox instead.

 

For the system, id get a premade dell server, your paying a bit more, but your getting a box with support that works with better uptime.

 

Id probably get something like a dell t330 with 32gb ram, xeon e3 1230 v5, and a few hdds for storage.

[Falconevo]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Using vms will work fine. Id stay away from unraid due to is bad vm system, and use proxmox instead.

 

Proxmox and Unraid now use KVM for virtualisation as Unraid reduced Xen support awhile ago?  Not sure what you mean by bad VM system as they both use the same now.

 

As for the original question, split the roles on a single piece of hardware.  Take in to account networking performance for VOIP and set appropriate operating system optimisations as default OS installations rarely cater for VOIP latency improvements.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Falconevo said:

Proxmox and Unraid now use KVM for virtualisation as Unraid dropped Xen support awhile ago?  Not sure what you mean by bad VM system as they both use the same now.

well unraid is missing many features for vm's such as

 

Non pinned cores,

No Clustering.

Using network shares(iscsi, FC, NFS) for storage of images

Only one drive pool

worse snapshots

no vdi support

very limited support compared to other hypervisors and basically no usage in the business world.

 

 

[spongeBOB1983]

ok thanks will take it under advisement if anyone else has ideas I'm willing to listen to them also

[Archnemesis]

On 03/06/2017 at 0:46 PM, spongeBOB1983 said:

ok thanks will take it under advisement if anyone else has ideas I'm willing to listen to them also

Something you'd want to consider is a layer 2 switch that supports QOS, that way the VOIP traffic takes precedence over the camera traffic.

If you got one with POE you could power your cameras off it too.