The simplest way of looking at it is that Asterisk is simply one of the many components of Issabel,VitalPBX. While Asterisk is the actual PBX software, Issabel,VitalPBX is a self-installing package that installs a complete operating system, Asterisk PBX, and all the supporting components as listed in the previous section.

The core strength of Issabel,VitalPBX lies in its simple setup and FreePBX (the web interface). This book will cover FreePBX in detail for the configuration of our PBX system as well as the other components.

To get an Asterisk system up and running, we would have to pick a supported Linux distribution, install the distribution, configure it securely, and then install Asterisk and configure that. With Issabel,VitalPBX we have one installation routine, which not only gives us a fully functioning operating system with Asterisk installed but also pre-installs all the other components for us.