[asterisk-users] Anyone using Asterisk on VirtualBox ?

Thu Sep 15 02:14:16 CDT 2011

Hi

What about OpenVZ. Its good

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 12:38, RSCL Mumbai <rscl.mumbai at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> --
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Amit Anand

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