That's great Sacha, thanks for the rundown. I'm looking forward to having some time to play with virtualization once I'm laid off. Apparently its becoming a big thing these days.
Peter M. > I figured I would share my experience running trixbox on xen (which is a > virtualization technology > for those who may not know - http://www.xensource.com/xen/). I originally had > a little celeron 350 > running asterisk at home quite well. I upgraded my main workstation and > decided that the older > motherboard/CPU could be used as an interesting little project to consol > idate the [really] old > hardware I had running various servers - file, web, asterisk, etc. The > hardware: AMD 1800+ > (1500 Mhz), 768 MB RAM, couple of hard drives. I performed a very basic > installation of Ubuntu > breezy and installed and configu red the xen binary installation. I knew I > wanted some flexibility > with the disk layout, so I created a metadevice and used lvm to slice it. > More information on the > xen installation is at: http://phorkar.blog-city.com/xen_install.htm for > those interested in the gory > details. > > Once I had xen and the first virtual machine running it was time to install > trixbox. I wanted to use > the default cd installation instead of installing centos by hand and then > adding trixbox so I used > vmware player to perform an installation of trixbox from a cd-image. Once the > installation was > working and I had tested it a little bit, including connecting some soft > phones, I tarred up the file > system within vmware (in single user mode - i.e. asterisk , mysql and friends > downed), copied it to > a new partition on the xen server, untarred it and tweaked a couple of things > (new IP address, > etc), defined a new xen virtual machine definition file and booted it. There > were a few hiccups but > they were fairly easy to resolve and next thing I knew, I was running > asterisk on xen. > > I use a Sipura spa-3000 for pstn integration so I didn't have to worry about > integrating a PCI card > into the mix. This does mean that I am without conference capabilities (I > haven't managed to get > ztdummy compiled and running happily but I haven't tried too hard), but for > my installation, that's > not a big deal. I have now been running exclusively on the xen install for > about six months and > have been very happy with it. I met my goal of consolidating some older > equipment into a single > server and have had zero problems with trixbox running this way. The hardware > is running three > virtual machines: 1) trixbox 2) an external web server with php, mysql and a > few goodies and 3) > an internal web server. The hardware apea rs that it could handle more > virtual machines but I > have allocated all the RAM - I am sure if I added more memory that I could > boot at least two other > virtual machines. I have successfully upgraded to trixbox 1.1.1 using the > trixbox update script. > My telephone IP network is (mostly) on a dedicated subnet and the xen host > has multiple network > cards and is routing between the two subnets - this wasn't so much by design > as by necessity as I > didn't have en ough free ports on my switch at the time but I did have a dual > port Intel NIC kicking > around. > > So, if you've been thinking about using xen to run an asterisk installation > take this as my positive > experience in so doing.Of course, in most commercial installations this may > not be the best > option for a variety of valid reasons, but fo r a home installation its great. > > One of my next projects is to see if I can integrate some high availability > into my installation, that > is, have two computers each running xen be able to keep the filesystems in > sync and take over a > downed virtual machine in the case of a failur e (or for maintenance): since > my asterisk installation > just needs an IP address, I should be able to bounce it around the network > without too much > trouble. > > -- > sacha > ******************************************************** Peter MacFarlane, ACP Network Administration & Programming Target Call Center/ Message Centre P.E.I. ********************************************************
