[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and VMWare

[John Laur]

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