[asterisk-users] Asterisk 'Hosting'

[Douglas Garstang]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeremy McNamara [mailto:jj at nufone.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:23 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk 'Hosting'
> 
> 
> Douglas Garstang wrote:
> > Has anyone ever tried to run multiple instances of Asterisk 
> on a single system, running each with a different username, 
> and each in a separate base directory? Something like 
> /home/pbx/business-1, home/pbx/business-2 etc?
> > 
> > Did it work? I assume for every service that Asterisk runs, 
> on each instance, you'd have to use a different port numbers, 
> which may get confusing. Each businesses phones would have to 
> be configred with different SIP ports then too.
> > 
> > What about processes? I notice that Asterisk runs about 26 
> processes (or are they threads?) for a single instance.
> 
> 
> 
> Why do you need multiple instances?   Just setup your Asterisk 
> configuration to separate the various 'customers' or 'tenants'.

It's obvious that Asterisk was designed more for the enterprise (ie a single company), rather than for the carrier (ie multiple companies). It's a bit hard to explain here, but even with more than a few companies, the config files and dial plan start to become horribly complex.

Our first customer has 15 contexts (right now) in extensions.conf (we've broken each company into a separate files included from extensions.conf and sip.conf for some manageability).  At several hundred companies, that's several thousand contexts. We have three Asterisk boxes, and can add more, but the config is (almost) idential between them for redundancy, and this means that each Asterisk box has to have a dialplan configured for all companies.

Doug.