[asterisk-users] zaptel huge irq problem

[Stephen Bosch]

François Delawarde wrote:

> And I thank you for that (the helping part), you've found the deep cause
> of all my zaptel problems (Xen), so please don't leave me alone! ;-)
> 
> To be a bit more constructive, I'd like to ask you or anyone that dared
> to try using Asterisk on a non-dedicated hardware, specifically those
> that tried on a machine hosting VMs the following:
> 
> - If there is no way running Asterisk with Xen, what type of
> 'hypervisor' should I use in order not to have problems? KVM?, KQemu?,
> VMWare?

The only one I would bother with is VMWare Server. It is solid, proven
technology, and they have a big team of very talented engineers who have
worked years to get the virtualization to the point where it can be sold
as an enterprise grade product.

If I were to try virtualizing anything, it would be on VMWare Server.

> - What type of problems should I expect if I dare to do that? (of
> course, Asterisk will be realtime-niced to make it more important)

Well, in particular anything that expects unfettered access to hardware
(as most realtime applications which rely on interface cards do) is
going to be vulnerable to the proclivities of the hypervisor.

Virtualization is still mostly rocket science. I have no doubt that it
is the future and one day everything will run in virtualized
environments -- but we're still a bit away from that.

Virtualization makes financial sense when you have 20 database servers
running at 10% utilization; you can drop your hardware requirements by
at least a third... but for systems relying on dedicated hardware, I
would be very careful (again -- I speak from ugly experience here).

-Stephen-