[asterisk-users] Multitenant or Multiple virtual machines

[Steve Totaro]

lists at infoway.net wrote:
> 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
>
>
>   
Then try it in-house.  It should not take too long to setup and use SIPP 
to test.  It sounds like you have already made up your mind, so stop 
wasting time and try it.  Then post your results back to the list.

Since you do not list the shortcomings of the products you have looked 
at, I am afraid that making any recommendations is impossible.

Thanks
Steve