[asterisk-users] Smallest possible Asterisk VM

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 05:41:20AM +0000, Frank Church wrote:
> How small can an Asterisk system be, in terms of disk space utilized?

Is disk-space your real issue?

Disk space is cheap. Memory isn't that cheap, typically, on a VM
environment. Likewise CPU usage. If you're on a hosted environment, you
may also be limited on network bandwidth.

I can give you some rough idea from the sie of our live CDs[1]. They use
a compressed filesystem, so should generally assume that on a
non-compressed file-system the disk usage is double[2].
A rather minimal install of Debian Lenny is some 110MB. This is a basic
and non-optimized installation.  Our live CD takes some 200MB and also
includes Asterisk, PERL, Python (we needed it for AjaxTerm), Apache, and
a bunch of other things. We didn't attempt to optimize it for space. We
did not include a build envirnment, though.

Other distributions tend to be much more "desktop" by default and thus
need a "specialized" "minimal" version. This is often called JEOS (Just
Enough OS). Such versions of at least Ubuntu and SuSE are available.

My point is that maintainability is an important factor. What is your
procedure for upgrading Asterisk? Upload a whole new image? This might be
doable, e.g. if you set up a spare VM in advance. But you should be
aware of this issue.

> 
> I am looking for just asterisk, with mysql, postgresql, or sqlite,
> with PHP and Python.
> 
> After finishing the build and removing the tools, how small can the
> whole system be?
> 
> 100Mb, 200Mb?

I suspect that you can easily get to 500MB with just about any
distribution. Getting to 300MB and beyond may require some effort.

> 
> Can packages be used to build the whole system, like using debs and rpms alone?

[1] Our live CDs are based on Debian live. Debian-Live attempts to
remain as close as possible to Debian proper. Their modifications to the
original system, besides actually compressing the file system, are
negligable (in terms of disk space usage).

[2] You could use a compressed file system to save disk space. That
would be trading disk space for CPU usage. It also means that disk
access becomes slower, and I suspect this may hurt Asterisk.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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