[asterisk-users] Asterisk on Xen or Dedicated

[Dee Lowndes]

On 01/05/2008 00:27, "George Pajari" <George.Pajari at netvoice.ca> wrote:

> 
>> 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.

How does the pseudo timer compare to having a Digium card when handling
large number of calls in a meetme conference?

Also have you tried OpenVZ with a digium card does it allow direct access to
it?

> 
> 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).

I quiet like the sound of that as it does get a bit messy all on one
asterisk instance.

> 
> 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.

Thanks for the pointers.

Dee