[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and VMWare

[Dan]

Hi John,

Thanks for your effort to make me buy Call Manager..:-)
Maybe a 2K$ server with a couple of 2+ GHZ Xeons and 4GB of RAM will be good
enough to run just the Web interface of the Call Manager...
If running a maximum of two simultaneous audio calls through Asterisk
installed over VMWare is a far too big job for my computer, then
you're right.

In between I have found an old Compaq Armada notebook who does the job very
well, but unfortunately without any possibility to add any Digium hardware
to it.

Thanks to all of you who have tried to answer me to my question and I
consider this issue closed.

Dan


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Laur" <johnl at blurbco.com>
To: <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 5:49 PM
Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and VMWare


> Dan,
>
> Your problems are all the result of your computer and your software.
> It's not going to work for you in your setup. Repeat: It's not going to
> work for you in your setup. Repeat again for increased clarity: It's not
> going to work for you in your setup. I really don't understand why you
> keep asking the question because you keep getting the same answer from
> every single person. For the $299 that VMWare costs, you can build a
> barebones machine with a small HDD that is sufficient to run asterisk.
> Even if you'd rather run it all on the same machine, IT IS THE ONLY WAY
> YOU WILL GET ASTERISK TO RUN PROPERLY. VMware Workstation is NOT
> DESIGNED to do this kind of job. As I said in a post before, VMWare GSX
> Server which is designed to do this sort of thing (but still may be
> insufficient for asterisk) is priced at $2500. If you bought a support
> contract from VMWare, they'd tell you the same thing.
>
> Software running inside of VMWare with a Win32 host is not going to give
> you good performance when it needs to be interactive, and Asterisk needs
> to be interactive a lot of the time. No matter how many performance
> tweaks you make to the Win32 box, you're still going to have problems
> with asterisk. With the amount of RAM you have, Windows WILL swap the
> VM's main memory to disk after a while. This will cause you
> insurmountable performance problems with asterisk or any service-type
> application running in the VM. You can look at a SIP-Proxy only solution
> like SEP that doesn't do transcoding or IVR and maybe get things working
> IF you can figure out how to force windows to never swap VMWare to disk
> (ie buy another 640MB of ram and force VMWare to run in the highest
> priority even in the background)
>
> Here are your options. Both one of these will give you a 100% working
> solution to your problem:
>
> 1) Return VMWare if you have already purchased it for this purpose and
> use the $299 to build a standalone computer suitable for the task. If
> you don't want to build one, you can buy one already built:
>
> http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MC1740-1
>
> 2) Purchase a VoIP or IVR application that runs and is supported under
> Windows that suits your purpose. If you need all the functionality that
> Asterisk provides, are stuck on Windows, and already have some cisco
> equipment, I hear that they have a product called "CallManager" that
> might do what you need :)
>
> No amount of belief on your part is going to make your computer and
> VMWare do this.
>
> John
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-
> > admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Dan
> > Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 3:23 AM
> > To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> > Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and VMWare
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > > 1. run VMWARE in Full screen windows.
> > Tried this... same problem
> >
> > > 2. is your Linux kernel SMP? (see VM knowledge base)
> > I have the RH9 downloaded from Redhat site.
> >
> > > 3. what about your Linux guest CPU usage? Swap usage? Windows might
> > > report 5% but its what the linux guest sees that counts. VMWARE is a
> > > very good emulation but it is still an emulation. Doing near real
> time
> > > codec conversion on a AMD <1GH machine with 386MB might be too much.
> > I'll check this, but still I don't think that the CPU power or memory
> is
> > the
> > problem, more the interrupts and timing...
> >
> > > 4. Did you do bridge networking on the guest OS? NAT will invoke
> > > additional performance penalty, and have a big effect on your SIP
> call.
> > Bridging, using another IP address from the same subnet.
> >
> > > 5. What about the other "cards" in your system? Do they need a lot
> of
> > > interrupts from the PC? Check your perfmon for interrupts per
> second.
> > > CPU usage is only one piece of the pie.
> > I think yes, a lot of interrupts are shared between cards.....
> > I have:
> > - 1x Firewire, 2xUSB2.0, 1xUSB1.1, PCI Soft modem, USB Modem, 4xSerial
> > Ports, 1xgraphic card + TV Tunner (ATI All-in-Wonder 128) and a HA Box
> > (serial based).
> > I have succeeeded using USB under VMWare (a flash memory stick) , but
> > still
> > not able to use ztdummy or zaptelrtc (it uses USB for timing, not?)
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Dan
>
>
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