[Asterisk-Users] asterisk hosting

[snacktime]

I've been trying to think of a way that you could provide asterisk
hosting without having to resort to using virtualization such as UML. 
With asterisk being so touch about any type of latency, I would think
most any type of virtualization would be problematic.

I was thinking there might be a way through some non standard
configuration file setup to host multiple asterisk instances on one
box.  The problems I forsee are finding a way to prevent the
configuration files for an instance from interfering with another
instance (such as using the same bind address).   Shared access to zap
channels would be a problem also I think, although I imagine most
hosted setups would be voip only.  I would guess that if someone
really wanted to do this, they could fairly easily create a patch for
asterisk that put certain configuration variables into a system wide
file that only the sys admin could have access to.

I would also think that you could fit quite a few asterisk instances
on a single box, assuming there wasn't a ton of transcoding going on. 
But I haven't tried that so I really don't know what would happen with
30 or so asterisk's running at the same time.

One thing I found that does work very well is asterisk on freebsd 5
jails.  Problem is that asterisk isn't really supported on that
platform,  and I would not want to rely on it in production use.

Chris