How to plan FreePBX servers distribution

Hi guys, I’m a total newbie on Asterisk and FreePBX, so please be patient.

Here’s my situation: my company has multiple sites, each one connected with the headquarter via ethernet (some 10MBit links for small sites, some 1GBbit links for bigger ones).

At this time, we have at least 4 different system to handle phone services, with four different numbering plans (we’re merging 4 companies) and I need to make 1 system with 1 numbering plan.

1st solution: 1 single powerful freepbx server in the hearquarter, handling 120 external channels and 1000 internal extension.

2nd solution: multiple servers to cover at least the bigger sites (smaller ones will depend each one on a bigger one). This solution could also include a dedicated server for external channels, so that the headquarter internal calls do not weight on the server handling the external calls.

What should I do?

Thanks for any advice!

I think you should engage an experienced Asterisk/FreePBX consultant. Make sure they have a referencable 500+ extension deployment on their resume.

This is a very large project, it will take a team of professionals from the vendors/software/programmer/networking/platform … and a consultant own the design to put together a good design and manage the team.

A thorough analysis of connectivity needs to be performed before you can even begin your question as the answers are all predicated on the environment.

Agree totally. This needs a lot of analysis to find out what the best solution will be. Not only from the voice side but also the data side of your network as you will be sharing connections between voice and data to some extent or another.

We will get some help from the data provider (the one who supply most of the connection between sites, while we own some other fiber connections along our railway): they promised to provide an asterisk expert for some time.

Still, I’m trying to acquire the skills to deploy and manage this kind of solution. I’m a decent network administrator, so I presume I can manage the coexistence of data and voice if I know how to estimate the requirements for the voice traffic (bandwith, max delay and so on).
Is there any “starting point” to go from?

PS
Hiring a consultant would eventually make the opensource solution more expensive than a commercial one, as it often happens in this kind of situation.

Best regards,

Commercial or Open Source and enterprise with 1000 extensions has to have some help with the system.

If you have 10M and 1G connections to the remote sites I assume you have fiber. I also assume you are going to put in place some type of traffic policing to maintain QoS.

With that in mind you need to analyze the volume of extension to extension dialing at each of the remote offices and decide if you want the bandwidth consumption or the simplicity of a central server.

With 1000 extensions you need to be looking at our the two FreePBX endpoint solutions the free one and the paid app in our store and see the one that makes more sense.