[asterisk-users] Anyone using Asterisk on VirtualBox ?

[RSCL Mumbai]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Jeff LaCoursiere <jeff at sunfone.com> wrote:

>
> On Thu, 1 Sep 2011, RSCL Mumbai wrote:
>
>
>> I tried and failed with VirtualBox too.  Timing seemed impossible to
>> maintain, even on beefy hardware (hexacore)
>> with plenty of RAM (16G), and nothing else going on (single instance).  I
>> don't think VirtualBox is up to real-time
>> stuff.
>>
>> We use LXC now, and it is fantastic.
>>
>> j
>>
>>
>> Thx Jeff.
>>
>> Kindly share some more details on the kind of hardware you are using, LXC
>> parameters and the kind of load the system can
>> handle.
>>
>> I am sure this will help me and more like myself.
>>
>> Thx
>> Sanjay
>>
>>
>> My main interest of being on Virtual platform is portability / Backup.
>> In case of any h/w issues, or crashes, simply copy the VM on to another
>> box and you are up in minutes.
>>
>>
>> Sanjay
>>
>>
>>
> Hi Sanjay,
>
> LXC is more of a quasi-virtual platform - it doesn't give you hardware
> virtualization, but instead lets you share the kernel of the host between
> multiple instances.  To me this allows for multiple efficiencies and
> advantages that you don't get with hardware virtualization:
>
> 1) the host's memory is shared between all instances
> 2) the host's disk is shared between all instances
> 3) a shell on the host has access to the files in all of the instances
>
> So an instance that is truly idle is taking up very little resource on the
> host.  Versus a traditional hardware virt, which even when idle has an
> appreciable chunk of RAM and CPU in use all the time.
>
> For hosting lots of asterisk instances this is VERY efficient.
>
> We have it setup such that the host runs an asterisk image that is the
> "PSTN gateway" and has dahdi loaded for timing and access to interface
> cards.  It accepts calls for subscribed DIDs and routes them to the
> appropriate instance.
>
> Each instance has an asterisk process that is dedicated to a customer,
> which includes their own instance of FreePBX.  The dedicated asterisk
> instance uses a SIP peer connection to the asterisk running on the host
> which is its outbound access to the PSTN (or other instances).  The one
> gotcha I ran into was configuring the instance to allow access to the dahdi
> kernel module of the host, which is needed for timing for meetme (we still
> run 1.4).  The conf file needs to contain:
>
> # dahdi
> lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 196:0 rwm
> lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 196:253 rwm
> lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 196:254 rwm
> lxc.cgroup.devices.allow = c 196:255 rwm
>
> This is still in proof-of-concept mode for us, but we do have a half dozen
> customers representing about fifty seats running on it in beta.  No
> complaints in over two months, and the load average may as well be zero.
>
> The machine is a quad core Xeon (X3450 @ 2.66Ghz) with 8G RAM, running
> Ubuntu 11.04.
>
> Each instance is a subtree of the host's filesystem, by default (at least
> in Ubuntu) under /var/lib/lxc.  We created a template with a full asterisk
> and FreePBX installation.  To create a new instance we simply untar the
> template and run a sed script over a set of files to give it an IP address,
> hostname, and minor edits to various asterisk config files.  I haven't done
> it yet, but I intend to create a mirror of the host machine on another box
> with rsync, which will serve as the backup.  At some point I would like to
> have the instances running on both mirrors with failover.
>
> LXC docs basically suck.  If you do go down this road, you will have to be
> prepared to glean as much as possible from notes various people have posted.
>  I settled on Ubuntu 11.04 as a base because a lot of LXC specific scripts
> have been created to help with management.  Even so its kind of flaky
> shutting down and rebooting the instances.  Once they are running as you
> like it is stable, but I had a lot of weird things happen along the way as I
> was tweaking.
>
> OpenVZ is the older and more mature equivalent, and may be a better choice
> to start, but it is not built into the kernel as LXC is.  I don't have an
> real comparisons to provide operationally, but I can vouch for LXC being
> stable enough for production use so far.  I haven't stress tested it yet to
> see how many instances we can provide on a single host, but am hoping it to
> be a function of the number of simultaneous calls rather than the number of
> instances...
>
> Would love to hear from anyone else that is using LXC, especially in
> production.
>
> Cheers,
>
> j
> --
>

@Jeff, @Tarek,

I finally decided to move away from Virtualization.
I have read a lot of posts on various forums which suggests VB is not fully
ready for a real time application like Asterisk, and I have been facing
issues all the way.
LXC was a bit complicated for me and I was short on time.

Did a bare metal install and its working good.
My Quad Xeon 2.3 GHz CPU hardly hits 10% with 20 concurrent calls
I have only 2GB RAM for now and its 50% used.

Created a CloneZilla image last night, plan to install it on another similar
hardware later today.

I am wondering how to resolve ethernet conflict while restoring the image on
a new identical hardware (MAC address change causes OS to create 2 new
interfaces).

I do not have any PSTNs, pure IP.

Sanjay
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20110915/4f2ba373/attachment.htm>