[asterisk-users] Virtual Asterisk Installation

[Faris Raouf]

We have been successfully using Asterisk (1.6.0.x) in a heavily loaded
Virtuozzo (= commercial OpenVZ) environment for over a year. I'm sure we
aren't the only ones to do so.

We had some terrible problems with random "one-way audio a few minutes into
some calls" to start with, which I was worried were to do with the
virtualisation/timing. But after much hair pulling and investigation it
turned out to be down to some serious firmware bugs in the routers we were
using, combined (if I recall correctly) with an IAX bug-ette. At any rate
we've had no problems at all since these things were corrected.

This is all without a timing source too, but then we don't use conferencing.

We never handle more than 4 simultaneous calls though, and everything is
IAX/SIP based so there's no hardware interfacing issues for us to worry
about either.

There's actually a commercial Asterisk-based product, 4PSA VoipNow
(www.4psa.com), that specifically supports Virtuozzo and VMWare and also
Amazon EC2 (!!). Indeed, they even provide VMWare images, Viruozzo Templates
and an Amazon EC2 AMI for ease of installation in these environments.
There's a free version too with a 10 extension limit.

I should point out that although I've tried Voip Now, it was only to the
extent of installing it to look at the GUI - I didn't try making any calls
or registering any phones etc. I'm very familiar with the company through
their Plesk add-on products though, so I have no doubt it works. I don't
know which version of Asterisk it is based on. I am also unsure about
hardware interfacing with this product - which I think is really going to be
one of the main problems you will face for your project.

Faris.



> 
> Now my big question: What kind of virtualization should I run on the
> Server? I have already used VMware ESXi and Proxmox.
> It would be very nice if there was a way to make snapshots (for
> "backup" purposes).
> I read about clock problems (physical time != virtual time) and so on.
> If I'm right this does not matter when using OpenVZ but when using
> KVM, XEN, ESX, ...
> 
> Please tell me your opinion. I definitely want to run the Asterisk via
> virtualization - so we have to find a solution for this ;-)
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> felix
>