I toyed around with using ESX for asterisk which is more hardware intensive than sipx appears to be. I wanted the benefits of using a guest because of how nice it is to backup and have fail over to another server since I use centralized storage. I figured even if I have less users per servers, running more servers with smaller user counts is worthwhile if it means better up times. But on the other hand, in the few years I've been running asterisk, I've only ever had one that trashed itself without warning and took a few hours to get back online, no other problems ever.
I found that there are countless threads of people trying different things and all of them always seem to get to the same thing. If you're going to be running a fairly small system, then it should not be a problem assuming that you take care of some of the issues with using this type of setup. If you're going to be running a large, scalable system, you could be wasting your time. My approach was to have ESX on a hefty server, then run only ONE guest and nothing else. I found it pretty funny to hear people complaining about their servers not working well and right off the bat, they would say that they are running multiple guests. That right there sounds kinda silly to me but then again, I've also read that some folks have multiple pbx's on one vmware server so it's obviously possible. I suspect they are very low count pbx's though. Almost everyone complained about timing issues (clock drift) but I never saw them. I tweaked as much as I could, kernel, ESX tweaks, eliminating all non essential services, turning off BIOS options so that clock time wasn't being used for IDE or other peripherals, etc etc. I don't have enough hands on with sipx to offer much there but will probably try it on ESX running as the only guest at some point to see how things go. I'd love to be able to keep ongoing snapshots that I could revert to should a server go down but maybe they never will :). Mike On Thu, 3 Sep 2009 10:43:55 +0100, Simon Stockdale wrote: >� >� >�I know this topic has been discussed before but I want to try and get to >�the bottom of the issues that people have been facing. >� >�I’ve just fired up a new VM host (Dell 2950 V3, 2x Quad 2.66GHz chips and >�16GB memory, 4x300GB SAS 15k disks RAID5) and installed Microsoft Small >�Business Server in one resource group and SIPX (4.0.1) �in another. I then >�added three hard phones to the system and started hitting voice mail. >� >�From what I had previously read I was expecting to get broken streams and >�poor quality audio – I was happily disappointed! To then identify what >�the bottleneck in my configuration would be I started reducing the clock >�cycles required to run 3 concurrent VM sessions. I eventually got down to >�500MHz before I started noticing any problems at all; 200MHz was >�interesting! ☺ >� >�So getting to the point – what exactly are the problems that people have >�been seeing and on what sort of hardware, numbers of users, concurrent >�calls terminating on SIPX, etc…? Next test is to set up an ACD and use >�SIPP to put through a few more calls at the box then the monitor quality by >�using a hard phone. >� >�Kind Regards, >� >�Simon >� >�_______________________________________________ >�sipx-users mailing list [email protected] >�List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users >�Unsubscribe: http://list.sipfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/sipx-users >�sipXecs IP PBX -- http://www.sipfoundry.org/
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