*Hey guys!* Thanks for all your responses. We've played heavily with ESXi -- but before getting an Asterisk server with ESXi, I'm not ready to take a blind leap of faith here without bench marks. I don't mind swimming in a cold water if I know there are others with me :). But then again if there are other options besides ESXi catered for Asterisk, then I'd liketo investigate it.
During peak hours - we can hit 70+ simultaneous calls on ONE server alone. We've also been receiving lots of requests for Virtual Asterisk Hosting needs (plain vanilla Asterisk & FreePBX type). So I need to keep an open mind with Virtualization options for prospects & clients. *Robert: *If you are using software G729 transcoding - then forget ESXi. If you are doing any form of transcoding, then forget ESXi. If you are doing call recordings & some sort of transcoding, forget ESXi. If you are running Asterisk on top of other VM's on the same ESX(i), that is running Windows Servers, Application servers and ESX(i) - then forget it. IF you **must** use PRIs in a virtual environment, then use foneBRIDGE ( http://www.red-fone.com/) and make sure there is no transcoding going on. *Hey Dave: *Been a LONG while! As per XEN, I've never used it - but I've also heavily used Virtual Box. Though I love Sun's Virtual Box compared to VMWare Workstation - don't even think of deploying Asterisk on VirtualBox on a production platform. Trust me, as you always have :). *Cheers! Reza.* -- Toronto based VoIP / Asterisk Trainer, I.T. Consultant and Hosted PBX Solutions Provider. +1-647-476-2067. http://www.linkedin.com/in/seminar On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Robert Brock <[email protected]> wrote: > Odd, I had a lot of problems with ESXi. > > If I setup the asterisk server with just a firewall and asterisk server > everything ran fine, Isolated nics for each app and network (internal, DMZ > and external), worked fine, but as soon as you load more VM machines things > started to go sideways. Call quality of recordings went weird, G729 > connections started to act like there was a lot of jitter on the line. > > I tried loading a test server on our ESX cluster and it was much much worse > (60+ VM's). > > Also with ESXi you can't add PRI/PSTN cards, everything must be external. > > I couldn't see much point in running a production asterisk server as and VM > on ESX - Handy for testing but not for production. > > I have also tried using ESX as a media server for Video and once more than > 6 Vm were running on the ESX cluster video would get choppy for 1080P > streams, it's like the network resource pools are being shared, even when > nics are isolated to the specific VM. > > Robert Brock > Telecom Administrator, MKS Inc., www.mks.com > Waterloo, ON, Canada > Tel: 519-883-3243 or 800-265-2797 x3243 > Fax: 519-884-8861 > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Dave Donovan [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 9:27 PM > To: Asterisk Users Group > Subject: Re: [on-asterisk] VM ESXi on Asterisk Production Platforms. > > On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:34 AM, Reza - Asterisk Consultant > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Has anyone in here worked hands on with ESXi and Asterisk? Would like > to > > hear your input and benchmarks, along with recommendations of other > > alternatives that you may have placed at your data centre running > Asterisk. > > > > Do you prefer ESXi or other alternatives? If alternatives, then why? > > Reza, > > This is a timely post. We just deployed Asterisk (PBX in a Flash) on > our ESX 3.5 platform at our Mississauga office. ESXi is just a > skinnier version of ESX. > > It's a bit early to say much about long-term stability, but we've had > no problems with Asterisk since deployment. Fingers-crossed. > > During testing, we found we had choppy/poor quality audio on > playback() operations like autoattendant. It wasn't as bad with > voicemail messages so we installed native sounds, hoping that avoiding > GSM-ULAW transcoding would fix it. It was improved but not great. We > applie a kernel patch to resolve timing issues that caused the choppy > audio. Now it's smooth as silk. > > Info on that patch can be found here: http://pbxinaflash.com/vm/ > > We ran the code exactly as it appears near the bottom of the page. > The only other thing we had to do was edit grub.conf to make the new > kernel the default one. > > I imagine that you're looking at a hosted type of application so, > unfortunately, I can't tell you much about scaling since we're running > only one Asterisk instance and it's the only thing in the high > priority resource pool. It doesn't have to contend with any > resource-intensive guests on the same machine. > > We chose VMware a couple of years ago for several reasons not related > to Asterisk. Since then I've heard good things about other platforms > like VirtualBox and Xen but I have no first hand experience with them. > > Good luck with your project, > > Dave > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
