[asterisk-users] Multi-Tenant PBX with Asterisk

[Bryant Zimmerman]

Kannan

I have to disagree with Leanrod. We are a hosted (cloud) PBX company we 
successfully run our Multi-tenant systems in Virtual machines and have no 
issues with them. It comes down to designing your virtual environment for 
your target loads and then not exceeding them. This allows for fail over of 
hardware and scalability. We have moved our virtual phone switches live 
with full call loads and have no call drops.   We do not usually dedicate a 
single Virtual Machine to each customer either. We have built our own 
Multi-tenant PBX on top of asterisk. We achieve many of the features 
available in freepbx/trixbox (not all). This method allows us to cost 
effectively service our customers with a presence of scale in mind. It is 
not uncommon to have 5000 + extensions per virtual switch. This method does 
require highly skilled engineering to achieve stability. 

Bryant 

----------------------------------------
 From: "Kannan" <vasdeveloper at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 12:37 AM
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" 
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Multi-Tenant PBX with Asterisk

Thanks Leandro for your comments.  

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Leandro Dardini <ldardini at gmail.com> 
wrote:

2012/7/30 Kannan <vasdeveloper at gmail.com>
Hi 
 I came across couple of pointers on the Internet regarding solutions 
available for providing hosted PBX service. 
 1. Multiple PBXs: Using separate hardware to host each PBX. Pretty 
straightforward, but no hosting company wants to use it. 2. Multi-tenant 
PBX: Configuring multiple PBXs within the same instance of Asterisk. I.e. 
partitioning a single instance of Asterisk into multiple PBXs by way of 
configurations, using unique landing context for each tenant. 3. Virtual 
PBX: Multiple virtual machines within the same hardware, each host an 
instance of Asterisk. 
 Which one of the method above is generally used by hosted PBX service 
providers? 
 Isn't the second option with ARA a good choice for dynamic creation of 
multiple "small" PBX tenants? 
 Is the last option alone or combination of options 2 and 3 good for cloud 
based hosted PBX service offering? 
 Thanks, Kannan.  
  Working in the voip field from a lots of years, I have found all three 
type of business. 
 The first is maybe the easier and most common. Hardware is cheap and it is 
easier to "sell" a service like the PBX if it is sold together with a piece 
of iron. Usually the hardware is placed on client's network, using the 
bandwidth of the client. Usually together with the PBX is sold also a 
router/firewall/traffic shaper/vpn endpoint to try to optimize the traffic 
on the client's DSL. 
 The major pros about this solution is you can use a normal PBX like 
freepbx/trixbox,  the client can mess the config how he likes, without 
disrupting other services, you can install VoIP card to connect landlines,. 

 The major cons is the cost of the hardware, the cost of the g.729 licenses 
(if any) and the maintenance cost of replacing hardware failures and the 
need to be physically near each client. 
 The second is the holy grail of the VoIP providers.  
 The major pros is the cost. Having a single hardware is cheap and it is 
still cheap also if you decide to get two to be ready in case of an 
hardware failure.  
 The major cons is the software. You cannot use the award winning 
freepbx/trixbox family and you need to deal with sometime limited or 
incomplete developed interfaces. The client always asks for the missing 
feature. One other major cons is the "reload". If the PBX software is not 
made using ARA, then every time you add a new peer or a new DID, you need 
to reload the entire PBX and that is a resource killer. Again, if the pbx 
interface is not made using ARA, then you cannot let your clients to change 
the configuration or they will trigger continuous reload (and delaying 
reload for example every 10 minutes is not a solution) 
 The last one is sometime the chosen compromise, but from my point of view, 
pbxes are not good software to virtualize. They are too sensible to delays 
and your voice quality can go down if the real server is overloaded. 
 The same for the cloud based solutions (I have yet to found). I suspect 
the "cloud" is good for services like http, not for real time applications. 
 
 Leandro 

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