[asterisk-users] Multitenant or Multiple virtual machines

[Chris Bagnall]

> I know there are many
> people using single-tenant and multi-tenant versions of asterisk
> management and billing packages, but I don't really know if anyone is
> using it within virtual machines and how well that scales.

We have a few FreePBX setups running in virtual machines in environments where the client wants their "own" PBX (and web interface to play with) without wanting to pay full whack for the server plus hosting, etc. However, we haven't scaled it beyond 3 or 4 VMs per machine - certainly not up to the 10 or 20 VMs you'd be looking at for what you're trying to do.

We do, however, have many asterisk installs with 30+ client companies using the same server. In these, each box only runs asterisk once. Each client has SIP identities as follows:

companyA-201
companyA-202
companyB-201
etc.

Each company has their own context to isolate their extensions from other users. This is definitely a more productive use of resources in that you haven't got the overheads of an OS and asterisk for each client.

> I wouldn't
> mind trying it, but since it will probably involve having to purchase
> multiple software licenses, we want to avoid the $ expense

What expense? If you've already got the servers, everything else you need is available open-source. Linux is open source, asterisk is open source, Xen is open source. Don't quote me on this - but isn't there even an open source version of VMware server these days? (There's certainly a free version of VMware server, so even if it isn't open source, there isn't any $ expense)

Regards,

Chris
-- 
C.M. Bagnall, Director, Minotaur I.T. Limited
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