[asterisk-users] Asterisk on Xen or Dedicated

[George Pajari]

> On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 13:11 +0100, Dee Lowndes wrote:
>   
>> ...Question is do I still need to worry about timing and if so can this be
>> resolved in a Xen enviroment?...
>>     

We're an ITSP and use OpenVZ to offer customers Virtual Private Asterisk 
Servers (see www.vpas.ca) -- the same idea as Virtual Private Servers in 
the Linux world but with Asterisk added.

Because of our network architecture, we chose to put the Digium cards in 
dedicated (i.e. not virtualised) servers acting as gateways to several 
OpenVZ servers so that the base environment (called VE0 in OpenVZ 
nomenclature) does nothing but load the ztdummy module. All the client 
VEs communicate with one or more SBCs or media gateways (i.e. servers 
with Digium Quad-PRI cards) using SIP or IAX.

Each virtual environment has access to a pseudo timer so they can run 
meetme conferences etc.

Works very very well. We've migrated existing Asterisk configurations 
from dedicated servers to OpenVZ virtual servers for customers who 
cannot tell the difference. And a lot cleaner and more secure than 
trying to run multi-tenant configurations/dialplans within a single 
asterisk instance (which we still do for some customers for historical 
reasons).

Sorry but we've no experience running Asterisk on Xen -- we looked at 
Xen way back when were deciding on which way to go and chose OpenVZ 
because it was (at least for us) easier to get running, easier to 
support ztdummy, and more efficient (i.e. thinner) than Xen.

>> One other question is how does multi cpu's scale is it better to have a
>> highspeed dual core or a lower speed quad core?
>>     

We use both and given the modest load you're proposing, it won't matter 
-- get the cheapest. Our benchmarks showed that we get more bang for the 
buck with X3210 Quad Core Xeons than the dual cores and so that is what 
we've standardised on for now but YMMV.

-- 
George Pajari (dCAP), netVOICE communications 604 484 VOIP(8647) x102
   www.netvoice.ca  www.ip-centrex.ca  www.ip-pbx.ca  www.vpas.ca
     www.digium.ca www.grandstream.ca www.sipura.ca www.snom.ca
Open Source VoIP/Telephony Specialists  1 877 NET VOIP (638 8647 x102)