[asterisk-users] Multitenant or Multiple virtual machines

[lists at infoway.net]

Hi all,

We want to offer hosted PBX services to some of our clients (maybe  
10-20) and were wondering if it makes sense to get a software package  
capable of handling multiple virtual tenants or if we should just  
create multiple virtual machines in our server each running a single- 
tenant license of the software.

We have been researching virtual PBX software for asterisk for a  
couple of weeks and the number of solutions that we found that can  
handle multi-tenant needs are limited and even the ones available can  
not do everything some of our clients need. On the other side, there  
is a large quantity of single-tenant packages out there which seem  
more "feature-complete" than the multi-tenant versions we have found.

Since we're not going to be doing any transcoding and using only SIP  
(no IAX or ZAP channels), we started pondering about the virtual  
machine solution (small number of extensions and simultaneous calls;  
we don't expect the number of simultaneous calls to exceed 50). Would  
you guys recommend it? The only thing disadvantage we have thought of  
so far is that when a client happens to call a number that is hosted  
by one of the other clients, the call may end up going up to the SIP  
carrier and back down to us, unless we carefully setup something like  
DUNDi, which we have no experience with and we don't know if these  
single-tenant packages even handle DUNDi setup thru their web  
management interface.

Any opinions/comments/recommendations? Before anyone recommends just  
buying the virtual PBX service from someone else, we _really_ want to  
do this in-house :)

Thanks