[asterisk-dev] 1.4 and CDRs -- The Breaking Point

Venefax venefax at gmail.com
Sat Feb 7 15:35:20 CST 2009 

We have found that having one independent Asterisk per client, with its
unique IP address, is the best way to minimize downtime in service. This
knowledge comes from actually doing the business in a large scale. The
alternative would be to use a commercial softswitch like Nextone. For 10.000
simultaneous calls, a Nextone goes for around 1 million. So this
architecture saves about a million and change. We use SQL Server 2008, with
perfect results.
Also, your idea of Windows requiring a license per virtual machine is false.
The Windows 2008 Server Datacenter edition allows a high number of virtual
machines to coexist with one license. Virtualization is the way of the
future. It is a lot cheaper to buy a large server, let´s say, a Dell with 16
cores and 128 GB goes for $20.000 directly from Dell. Any other alternative
that we have researched, either hardware based or software based, is several
times more expensive, for the same amount of calls and stability. But please
let me know where we did calculate wrong. 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Michiel van Baak
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 3:57 PM
To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] 1.4 and CDRs -- The Breaking Point

On 15:37, Sat 07 Feb 09, Venefax wrote:
> The fact that Easysoft does not want to work with virtualization makes it
a
> useless product. Think about the economies of scale. 

It has nothing to do with virtualisation. Their product is licensed on a
per machine base. A virtual machine is still a machine.

> I have several servers
> with 16 cores and 128 GB of RAM, filled with Asterisk's virtual machines.
I
> calculated that going that route would cost my company over 1 million
> dollars, versus zero with Freetds. 

If those vm's were running windows, you still need to get a license for
windows for every vm. Same thing.

> What we do is wholesale trading. We
> assign an independent Asterisk virtual machine to each client. 

Why ? Asterisk can do this with just one instance.
We run a bunch of asterisk machines, handling way more clients then
asterisk instances. We use dialplan contexts for this without trouble.

> We use a
> cluster software provided by Proxmox, that allows us to relocate the
virtual
> environments when the machine needs to be taken down, etc. The technology
> underneath the hood is OpenVZ, which has very little overhead. Please
> suggest a better strategy and I will follow it. I have around 400 virtual
> machines in my environment, in one single rack. I hope you don't think
that
> you can match this scenario with blades an still stay in one single rack. 
> I think that the British are royalists, even when writing software. We are
> revolutionaries, even when applying technologies to make money. God save
> Obama.

We dont have to run 400 virtual machines in one rack. but it's certainly
possible if you load a 42U rack with sun X4150's, put debian on them,
and start using kvm for virtualisation.
Showing off the number of vm's per rack is not the deal here. You want
to serve around 400 customers on asterisk. You have no need to run 400
vm's for that.
We run around 100 to 150 clients on a single asterisk server (depends on
the number of sip devices and concurrent calls the client needs). So for
your 400 we have to run 4 servers. Ok, we want this redundant so we add
another 4 servers for the asterisk instances and two servers to spread
the load acros the 8. That makes a total of 10. 10x1U is 10U. That's not
even a half rack here in .nl (where 42U is the smallest, and some
colocating facilities give you 52U)
So in this case it would give you 8 licenses instead of 400. How about
that ?

> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Michiel van
Baak
> Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 12:36 PM
> To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] 1.4 and CDRs -- The Breaking Point
> 
> On 11:49, Sat 07 Feb 09, Venefax wrote:
> > There is certainly a "paid" version, extremely expensive, $1500 per box.
> If
> > you use virtual machines, exclusively, like I do, it would cost you a
> > fortune, I mean, literally. I explained the fact that in the US we are
> fully
> > virtualized and we use hundreds of virtual machines in cluster of big
> > servers, a cloud, instead of a big physical box, but the manufacturer in
> > London wanted $1500 per virtual machine and I had to stop using them,
> after
> > buying one copy. They are clearly still living in the 20th century.
> England
> > is still a place with a queen. I argued for a change on the licensing
> model,
> > but they would not follow any clues. You are welcome to contact them.
> >
>
http://www.easysoft.com/products/data_access/index.html?gclid=CNTild_uypgCFQ
> > pgswodQB0W1Q
> 
> Cant help it, but I have to go off-topic here.
> Please ignore this email if you like.
> 
> You are clearly not getting the idea here.
> A virtual machine is still a machine. Licenses that are sold per machine
> are licenses that are sold per machine.
> They have totally no need to change their way of doing business because
> you are using virtualisation.
> There's no way they force you to use virtualisation or a big box.
> 
> The statement that everyone is using virtualisation is wrong as well.
> Most 'cloud' setups are still done with bare-metal running the service.
> 
> Add to that that virtualisation is highly overrated and you'll see where
> this is going.
> 
> A license is a license. They decided to go this way. If you dont like it
> dont use it.
> 
> Question:
> Digium is selling G729 (and soon skype) on a per channel basis.
> Are you going to make the same statement as above when your business
> reaches 100 concurrent channels with this technology ?
> 
> Question2:
> Most colocating facilities charge you per KWh power.
> Are you going to make the same statement as above when you replace all
> your gear with HP blades that need 380v 2500W powersupplies ?
> 
> </rant>
> 
> Now to the constructive part of my email:
> If this problem is affecting you, why not setup a linux box/couple of
> linux boxen with postgresql ?
> Most of the things in mssql can easily be converted to postgresql (I
> know because I did loads of those conversions) and all the stuff you
> need is available for free.
> 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
> > [mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Sebastian
> > Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 11:32 AM
> > To: 'Asterisk Developers Mailing List'
> > Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] 1.4 and CDRs -- The Breaking Point
> > 
> > Is there any other MSSQL driver to compare the results?
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
> > [mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Tilghman
> Lesher
> > Sent: s?bado, 07 de febrero de 2009 01:32 p.m.
> > To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] 1.4 and CDRs -- The Breaking Point
> > 
> > On Saturday 07 February 2009 04:40:32 Venefax wrote:
> > > Your statement about Freetds is untrue. I hired Frediano Ziglio of the
> > > Freetds team to work with Murphy and he did not find any problem by
> > tracing
> > > the driver.
> > 
> > You also hired Digium to trace the problem, and we couldn't find a
single
> > problem with our stack, either.
> > 
> > > Furthermore, it can be proven that Freetds works fine since I 
> > > use AGI and Perl to the same job that slows Asterisk to a halt.
> > 
> > That's not the same job.  By your own admission, it opens and closes the
> > database connection for every single job and runs each query in a
> completely
> > separate process.  That's quite a bit different from sharing resources
and
> > running many queries on the same connection.
> > 
> > > There is 
> > > like a bottleneck in Asterisk. When the amount of calls to a func_odbc
> > > driver goes above 10-15 per second, the rate of calls to the database
> > > versus calls to func_odbc starts dropping dramatically.
> > 
> > Except that it doesn't, when you use a backend like MySQL.  It's only
when
> > you
> > use the FreeTDS backend that it slows down.
> > 
> > > I call that 
> > > constipation. Please ask Steve Murphy about the case.
> > 
> > I actually worked closely with Steve Murphy on this case, and I'm fully
> > aware
> > of the testing done.
> > 
> > > The only way to make 
> > > it work is to call a Perl script that opens and closes a connection to
> the
> > > database for each call, which is absolutely inefficient and makes me
use
> a
> > > very expensive SQL machine. The mechanism to share the connections to
> SQL,
> > > called "pooling", is flawed. Just picture it this way: Asterisk cannot
> > > handle more than 20 queries per second to the database using
func_odbc,
> > > while I can get to 100+ calls per second using AGI and Perl. I have
not
> > > reached yet any upper limit using Perl.
> > 
> > Right, but you're using a completely different methodology that relies
on
> > hundreds of different engines running concurrently, as opposed to
running
> > hundreds of different instances on the same engine.
> > 
> > > I think that we need to redesign 
> > > the entire ODBC technology from scratch.
> > 
> > You are certainly welcome to redesign it and contribute your new design
> back
> > to the community.  Many others, who are not using FreeTDS, have no
problem
> > using func_odbc.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Tilghman
> > 
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> -- 
> 
> Michiel van Baak
> michiel at vanbaak.eu
> http://michiel.vanbaak.eu
> GnuPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x71C946BD
> 
> "Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?"
> 
> 
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-- 

Michiel van Baak
michiel at vanbaak.eu
http://michiel.vanbaak.eu
GnuPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x71C946BD

"Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?"


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