[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk 1.2.6, VMWare, & Playback/BackgroundGSM prompts

[Technical Support]

I think you might have misunderstood my point.  From a horsepower
perspective you are right.  However, from a latency perspective, virtual
machines suffer from too much skew in their timeslices.

If the server is performing background tasks the impact is unperceivable.
If the server is performing real-time tasks, then the impact will be
dramatic (like choppy voice).  In an extreme case, if you have enough
horsepower combined with few other tasks/VM's on the same machine, your
timeslices may be consistent enough to make real-time processing acceptable.
Don't count on it however!

The bottom line is that PC virtualization and real-time applications don't
mix.  You are better off with less horsepower without latency issues.

MD

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Oliver [mailto:goliver at cistera.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 1:19 PM
To: Technical Support; Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial
Discussion
Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk 1.2.6, VMWare, &
Playback/BackgroundGSM prompts

On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 13:08 -0500, Technical Support wrote:
> You can't reliably run a real-time application (like asterisk) on a 
> virtual machine.  You will get better performance from an old PC than 
> a VM on a new top-end PC.  Sorry
>  
> MD

Hmmmm, I would have to say a properly configured GSX server running on Linux
will run almost any OS and outperform and old PC.  

So you may want to go with GSX vs. Workstation if you don't just have a PC
you can put * on by itself.

-Greg