[asterisk-users] Running Asterisk on VMware ESX

[Blake Burgess]

The problem we ended up having with virtualised asterisk (on esx,
xenserver and hyperv) was that the clock timings to the vm aren't always
accurate when you're using dahdi_dummy.

We had a bunch of voice quaity issues which took ages to diagnose because
of this. Obviously if you have a DAHDI card that your passing through to
the vm or one of these http://wiki.sangoma.com/sangoma-wanpipe-voicetime
you can avoid this.

-Blake

On 11/06/12 5:07 AM, "Chris Bagnall" <asterisk at lists.minotaur.cc> wrote:

>On 8/6/12 9:17 pm, Hiers, Richard wrote:
>> I don't expect to need to use any special hardware, just a sip trunk
>>over our broadband connection.  We have about 150 phones at present.  Is
>>ESX a viable platform for us?  And second, what is the recommended
>>virtual configuration (mem, cpu, etc.)?  Any other considerations?
>
>I think the concern expressed about running Asterisk on a virtualised
>platform is more to do with the impact the other load on the host
>machine might have on your Asterisk VM. If you're using ESX in a shared
>hosting environment where you have very little control over the other
>workload on that host, then sooner or later there's a risk your VM is
>going to experience spikes in latency.
>
>On the other hand, if you're running a virtualised platform internally
>where you can control precisely the load on the host machine, then
>you'll probably find you're fine.
>
>FWIW, we run Asterisk under Xen in production. Some of the VMs have well
>over a thousand connected SIP devices and we've yet to encounter
>significant problems. But we're able to control the other VMs on the
>hosts very precisely: the only other VMs running on those hosts provide
>low-load services such as rsync for remote backup (which is only used
>late at night when call load is low on the Asterisk VMs).
>
>Running Asterisk in a VM, even if it's the only VM on that host, does
>give you some considerable benefits in the event of host machine
>failover: hardware independence and live migration are the two that
>spring immediately to mind.
>
>Kind regards,
>
>Chris
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