[asterisk-users] asterisk on Vmware

[Leif Madsen]

On 10-08-11 04:36 AM, Tino wrote:
> Is it possible to install Asterisk on Vmware(centos) from source. Is
> there any difference or disadvantage for this compared to asterisk
> running on physical machine.

As mentioned you won't have access to DAHDI hardware as VMware won't permit 
access to it. However, I have run VMware Server 2 on several machines and 
successfully used Asterisk inside of it, at least for testing purposes. For a 
while I was running my business PBX in a virtual machine until I ran into some 
issues, but it ended up not being related to VMware and I never switched it back 
-- however I have low load (i.e. 2-3 channels at most). Some tips:

* If you need hardware access and you can install into the host system (like 
when you run VMware Server), you could install a barebones Asterisk installation 
along with DAHDI and use that as the access from your virtual machines to the 
hardware over SIP (i.e. create a connection from the virtual machine Asterisk to 
the host system Asterisk via SIP). This way you could have multiple phone 
numbers and direct each number from the host system to one of several virtual 
machines.

* As of Asterisk 1.6.2, you have additional timing options such as 
res_timing_pthread and res_timing_timerfd (kernel version dependent). The 
res_timing_pthread had several issues in the past, but should have been fixed 
for the most part as of Asterisk version 1.6.2.10 (don't use that timing module 
before that version).

* Giving the virtual machine more RAM than necessary can actually make the 
system perform worse rather than better in my experience.

* Perform load testing with SIPp to make sure you system can handle what you 
expect to put on it. I typically do this by loading up the system with SIPp and 
having an extension (my phone) dialed into the Milliwatt() application to listen 
for when audio quality starts to die, and note that as the max load / max calls 
/ max memory for the system.

* Good luck! :)

Leif Madsen.