FYI Is PIAF Good for Big Deployments?

iworkhere

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how large of an environment is everyone deploying PIAF in? we have around 300 phones

i talked to the folks at schmooze and they recommend the freepbx distro. according to them PIAF is a hobbyist distro.

What is everyones thoughts on this and what distros do you recommend for big deployments?

Thank you,
 

wardmundy

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I talked to the folks at schmooze and they recommend the freepbx distro. According to them, PIAF is a hobbyist distro.


If "hobbyist distro" means you don't have to pay for it, then the Schmooze Com folks are right on the money: free code and free support with source code for Asterisk and FreePBX on your machine when you complete the install. PIAF uses the same Asterisk and FreePBX GUI releases that Schmooze does. Unlike the other distros, we install from source code and compile based upon your individualized hardware platform. Schmooze Com installs from generic RPMs. One size fits all. With source code-based Asterisk, you can tweak it to meet your own requirements in a matter of minutes. Try that with RPMs.

The other (major) difference is PIAF relies upon industry-standard Linux distributions (CentOS, Scientific Linux, RHEL). Schmooze Com installs a proprietary Linux OS, their own. That means the code, the update repository, security fixes, and the timeliness and reliability of all of the above are solely Schmooze's responsibility. We rely upon a worldwide network of developers and repositories to maintain the RedHat Linux flavors we support. Most are maintained by universities, the U.S. government, and Fortune 500 companies around the globe. The Schmooze Com code, repository, and hardware are maintained by, you guessed it, Schmooze Com. So the choice is yours.

As for the number of users that can be supported, it depends entirely upon the type of hardware you purchase, not the label on the distro or the hardware. We have major airlines and government agencies and Fortune 500 companies that all rely upon PIAF.

There are plenty of gurus on this forum to assist you in making appropriate hardware choices using commercially available hardware. For the same reasons that we've chosen the operating system platforms that we have, we also tend to shy away from private label hardware as "hobbyists."
 

iworkhere

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Thanks for your input. So we have had some issues and i opened up a support tickets. thats when one of the guys said PIAF is a hobbyist distro and we need to move to their distro as PIAF has issues and its not as stable as theirs. I thought i was going to get help on PIAF but they want to sell me on a conversion to their platform. Made me really frustrated.....
 

billsimon

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Thanks for your input. So we have had some issues and i opened up a support tickets. thats when one of the guys said PIAF is a hobbyist distro and we need to move to their distro as PIAF has issues and its not as stable as theirs. I thought i was going to get help on PIAF but they want to sell me on a conversion to their platform. Made me really frustrated.....


Technically speaking, they should be willing to support a FreePBX system (meaning a system running FreePBX, not necessarily FreePBX Distro) since their support offering listed at freepbx.org/support-and-professional-services does not indicate support ONLY for FreePBX Distro but for "FreePBX."

That said, from a tech support point of view, you will get better support from Schmooze if you are running their distro, because that's what they know. They can also likely work on your PIAF system but you will probably pay more for it because it's "non-standard" to them. Their claims about stability and usability had better be related to the specific problem(s) you are experiencing or they are wasting your time and money. I would be displeased at paid support that wanted me to switch due to FUD and "just because."
 

Huckda

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FYI: hobbist distro, with FULL FEATURES plus...
I shopped around quite a bit from the phone system vendors in Portland, OR... Toshiba wanted about 10x as much for a box that did less than 1/2 of what PIAF does, and required use of proprietary toshiba phones with a per-phone license..
the other 3 quote I solicited were in the same ball-park and all pretty much proprietary junk(IMHO)
so I searched more and found PIAF... spent about 2-3 weeks using it strictly with a google-voice trunk before deciding on purchasing a card for the 4 telco copper lines this location required.(I'm the IT guy and thus the phone guy somehow)
so when their old Toshiba stratus went tits-up... the 4 lines got re-routed and plugged into the PIAF box... and voila.. now we have free long distance, much greater control and accounting, yadda yadda yadda...

I do NOT miss using a proprietary system one little bit...and this forums is an AMAZING resource as are the people who populate it.
nerdvittles is fun to peruse as well :) Ward makes some tedious things like setting up a VoiP system FUN in my opinion.

Oh and this site runs on a Dell Optiplex 745 with 4GB of ram and a 500GB HD, with 50 endpoints and on average has 5% cpu usage and about 10% ram usage(it's a small private high school)

also... 300 phones you mentioned... but how many concurrently in use? with our 50... the most I've seen at one time are 10 lines in use.
 

hecatae

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PIAF is fantastic at coping with Big Deployments, "Freepbx the Distro" is not, the only sour point I can currently see with PIAF is the Freepbx GUI as it is slowly becoming just a constant advertorial for Schmooze and the Freepbx Distro.

Freepbx offer a PBXiaF to freepbx conversion script, see here:

http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FD/Converting+PBXiaF+Distro+to+a+FreePBX+Distro

and yes you can run it on Scientific Linux, it does not distinguish the difference, you lose lots and lots of functionality, it removes the source built asterisk and installs their binary, and then you have to run freepbx upgrade scripts from the cli to keep it upgraded if you don't pay for the sysadmin button, see:
http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FD/Updating+FreePBX+Official+Distro

and those upgrade scripts can really hose your install, break cdr functionality etc, and you only really get help if you pay for it.
 

SkykingOH

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I am interested as to why you feel the FreePBX Distro (it is not the Schmooze Distro BTW) is not appropriate for large installs.

The commercial HA module provides support for truly redundant operation and offers another level of accountability in the form of service agreements and support.
 
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My $.02.... For someone that is willing to get under the hood, the PIAF platform works well. I can't see (except for High Availability) where FreePBX distro has any advantage.

A disadvantage to using PIAF is that if you are using Commercial Modules, Schmooze will basically disavow any real responsibility to support these apps on any platform other than their distro (which I find a bit disingenuous). The vast majority of the apps will work with PIAF, but some require additional features added into modules they have compiled in their distro.

One example came up when trying to migrate to the EPM and the Restful Apps. My customer needs the ability to have a BLF lit for a voicemail box other than their own. This will only work on the modified modules in the FreePBX distro. Since this was a deal breaker, and I had already gotten the rest of the system up and running, I ended up shelving the EPM and the Restful Apps and put the Aastra XML Scripts on this particular system. It wasn't worth my while to totally reinstall the system on their distro.

Also, if you like playing (using) the Incredible PBX features, you won't have them on the FreePBX distro.
 

phonebuff

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Thanks for your input. So we have had some issues and i opened up a support tickets. thats when one of the guys said PIAF is a hobbyist distro and we need to move to their distro as PIAF has issues and its not as stable as theirs. I thought i was going to get help on PIAF but they want to sell me on a conversion to their platform. Made me really frustrated.....


So what are/were your issues and have you tried opening a forum discussion here, or using the Jobs forum to find a consultant to help you here.

:cool:
 

hecatae

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I am interested as to why you feel the FreePBX Distro (it is not the Schmooze Distro BTW) is not appropriate for large installs.

The commercial HA module provides support for truly redundant operation and offers another level of accountability in the form of service agreements and support.


The HA module is the only module I find beneficial on the FreePBX Distro, although HA redundant standby can be replicated using the Backup & Restore menu.

I can take this further when I have the time, in several tests I have ran, PIAF and IncrediblePBX run lighter and more efficiently than the FreePBX Distro.

The main reason I can see, is that precompiled .rpms are never as efficient as compiling and installing from source tuned specifically to the hardware you are installing on.
 

anomaly0617

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I don't like to link to other forums when I'm bashing their products, so I won't.

All I'll say is this: FreePBX's alpha releases of 11.x borked up one of the PIAF PBX'es that I support. All of a sudden IVRs and Call Forwards and a whole littany of other features stopped working. I take full responsibility for the failure, as when I discovered they were alpha releases I should have not done the upgrade, but after 50+ upgrades from FreePBX that were fine, I figured they were safe. My mistake.

In any case, I was done with FreePBX, and since PiAF uses FreePBX, I decided to look for another phone system, perhaps Asterisk based, perhaps not, that would work with my existing endpoints (Yealink, Grandstream, and Cisco at this point).

Boy, what an eye-opener that was.

I won't tell you here what distro's I tried, but I will state that you've mentioned one above. All I'll say is, after about four days of trying other distro's and running into complete dog piles of terrible implementations and code, I came running at a sprint back to PiAF and sighed a big sigh of relief when the system was back online and everything functional again.

In other words, my hat is off to Ward and the team of developers that make PiAF. It's a breath of fresh air.

-Anomaly0617
 

atsak

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I have done a few deployments, on hardware and in Hyper-V - all work fine so far. Only ever had one major problem I couldn't solve, and that was a bad internet connection, nothing more. I think the largest number extensions I have is an 80 extension one. I only use PIAF because it builds on a few platforms and takes care of some of the security settings for me with iptables etc. I have sold to clients some Schmooze commercial add ins, and they were fine, but my clients have not been impressed (in fact the opposite) with the support calls they've made when I refer them for specialized issues (I often work in a joint effort with some of my clients; an in house person and I work together to deploy). I think the guys are clever at Schmooze but are a little, uh, grumpy at times.
 

womble1

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I have 12 Piaf systems running, one for about 6 years now or more, I have NEVER had an issue the only time things have gone wrong is a bad internet connection or a failing hard drive.
I now use WD back drives for all systems, backup every night and have a virtual Piaf waiting to boot up if the main system goes down.
I have even played with the raspberry pi piaf - lots of fun.:cool:
Most of our systems are supporting up to 40 extensions and customers think the systems rock, so much so that people are now knocking on our door as they heard about the price point, rock solid system and amazing call quality.
I would say that the free distro is the way to go, its just my opinion but the cost for some of Smooze's plugins is exorbitant :ack2: , as people here say most of the functionality can be replicated in pIAF where you have far more features.
I usually install on wildly over spec'd hardware I never see the CPU go over 1 % for any period of time.
Learn the system, understand a bit about linux and asterisk and buy yourself some Aastra 6757i's and you won't look back.
Please support Ward here as this distro is backed by 100's of people all working in the background.
If you have a backup you can restore in a matter of 10's of minutes if not almost instantly with a suspended virtual backup system.
I looked at all the rest and this is the best it sure has some whacked features which you don't need but basically this is done right, once you go proprietary you are caught in their grasp, also if it's totally open source as this is it allows another company to easily pick up the slack if you move to another sector.:rolleyes:
 

MrBostn

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FWIW I run PIAF 20650 as a Hyper-V 2012 guest for 64 users. I use a Sangoma VEGA100G as a PRI gateway. It's been running trouble free for a year.
 

dbaddour

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Hi all,

I have been running PBX for 3 years... would you please tell me the benefit of using Sangoma VEGA100G as a PRI gateway?
just out of curiosity if I am missing something?
 
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The benefit of using external gateways in general is to allow redundancy for your systems.
If you have a single box solution with a card in and it dies, your left to replace the machine and move the card over.
External units allow you to have an a-b model (and many different designs) should redundancy be high factor.

Other scenarios where external gateways are great is when you are using embedded or small form factor units that cannot allow space for internal cards.
 

phonebuff

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If you have a single box solution with a card in and it dies, your left to replace the machine and move the card over.

The real benefit is with hardware changing as quick as it does you are much less adapt to having to deal with obsolescence with an external interface
than with an internal hardware interface that may not fit or function in the "new" box.

In a multi box solution / hot standby, to switch from A to B can be almost transparent.

=========================
 

MrBostn

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Plus my PIAF is a Hyper-V guest. I have two systems connecting to my Vega 100G. the phone PIAF and the conference PIAF. I separated them. It started out as the "backup PIAF" but my initial PIAF Hyper-V guest was running so well I decided to create a personalized Conf Room for many of the users at my company. I didn't want to impact the PIAF install that is used daily for calls. Plus the users like their "vanity" conference service.

The two PIAF's are connect via IAX2
 

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