Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Ventrilo Hardware / Bandwidth Requirements

[TonyB]

Hi, I'm wondering for those of you out there with ventrilo licenses what sort of resources and bandwidth ventrilo takes? So if I had say the following hardware:

Dual Opteron 270
4GB Ram
2x36GB 15,000 RPM SCSI (raid-1)

How many slots would you expect to host on that hardware along with that the bandwidth requirements?

I am not interested in talking about licenses or anything of that nature so don't bother bringing that up in this discussion.

[Topcat_UK]

That's completely overkill if all you're going to host on it are Ventrilo servers. You will more than likely run out of bandwidth before hardware power. They run very light on resources and don't even take that much bandwidth either. I don't have enough first-hand experience to give you an exact figure. Something a quater as powerful as that will be more than suitable.

[TonyB]

yeah, I'm looking for actual bandwidth numbers. This isn't a run of the mill thing where yeah I have 2000GB of bandwidth for my month on my dual opteron 270. This is more along the lines I have 150mbit charged on 95% what sort of hit would my ventrilo slots take on that.

So I guess the better question is generally how much bandwidth would someone see per 100 actual slots used.

[AH-Sal]

Last time I hosted a 100 slots in 2 vent servers for gaming the bandwidth wasn't noticeable, though this would all really depend on the load the vent servers actually see. Sorry I can't tell exact numbers on how much traffic it had off hand though.

[Defcon|Rich]

Voice servers don't use very much cpu power. It's mostly ram and of course bandwidth.

I don't have the exact numbers in front of me but I can tell you we average around 15mbits/mo on each of our ventrilo boxes.

[TonyB]

Ok well I'm looking at some better answers here with regards to bandwidth.

So what I'm wondering for the most popular codec (whatever that is) what sort of kbps per user would you see? Or just smoe sort general figure to give me an idea here. 15mbit per box isn't very good just due to the fact I don't know if you're hosting 100 slots or 1000 slots.

[Defcon|Rich]

A few hundred slots wouldn't be noticeable at all.

Bandwidth requirements depend on which codec is being used and how many servers you have hosted, Exact figures would be very hard to give.


This is off the ventrilo site:

• Server Requirements •

The server CPU utilization under most conditions won't even register, so a fairly low level computer should be more then sufficient.

Bandwidth usage is determined by the codec and is dictated by the server. It could be as low as 600 bytes/sec or as high as 8000 bytes/sec per voice stream.

[xesjay]

i dont think you can host your own vent anymore anyhow... pretty sure you need a license from ventrilo to become a reseller and even at that its near impossible to become an official hoster

[Adam H]

Originally Posted by xesjay

i dont think you can host your own vent anymore anyhow... pretty sure you need a license from ventrilo to become a reseller and even at that its near impossible to become an official hoster

To sell ventrilo commercially you need a license, this includes bundling with commercial products such as gameservers.

However, it is free for personal use.

[dollar]

Originally Posted by Adam H

To sell ventrilo commercially you need a license, this includes bundling with commercial products such as gameservers.

However, it is free for personal use.

Up to 8 slots last I checked.

[vpncast]

Thats overkill --- the issue isn't with hardware I think its mainly bandwidth related... make sure you can handle the traffic through the NIC.

[qwidjib0]

Chris is dead on. The ideal config I've seen for Ventrilo is a very low end server with a 1000Mbit burstable uplink. Ventrilo is a killer on bandwidth with almost zero CPU and memory usage. You won't necessarily use 1000Mbps on all your servers, but you do need that overhead in case somebody thinks it would be fun to DDoS you, knowing that your 100Mbit port only has 5Mbps overhead. Don't use cheapy or shared bandwidth allocations, your users will definitely notice when you start losing packets - it's not as sensitive as game server, but it's not nearly as flexible as a web server either.

And don't make the mistake that most do, using a setup with the stereotypical managed hosting provider that only allows for < 2TB metered per machine and then reams you in overages, I promise your accountant will beat you around about it when you get to 80Mbps in upstream on a system.