Asterisk on VMware, phone line connections how?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
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I’m planning to install Asterisk on a VMware Workstation CentOS guest on a Windows 7 host. Host computer is an Intel i7 8-core CPU, 2.8 GHz, 16 GB RAM.

(Yes, I know… running Asterisk on VMware isn’t recommended and probably won’t work very well… I’m doing it as a convenient way to experiment and don’t expect it to work reliably in a deployed installation.)

Main question is how to get the phone lines interfaced, and since it seems that VMware won’t allow the use of hardware phone line cards such as the TDM410 or AEX410 (right?), it appears I need something that plugs into the network, such as a PAP2T or SPA3102… I actually have a PAP2T around here someplace if only I can find it… :frowning:

Folks keep telling me that Google is my friend <~> so I’ve been exercising it to find some likely candidates for phone line interfacing without much luck. It does seem like the PAP2T and the SPAxxxx series are discontinued or very soon will be, and so my question is… What are the latest options in POTS-to-ethernet adapters that will work with Asterisk? Also, I need this to work with as many as 8 phone lines (don’t expect it to ever be more than that), so… is there a practical limit on how many SPA3102’s or similar can I run simultaneously? Does anyone make an adapter that has multiple FXO ports rather than just one? If not ethernet to POTS, maybe USB to (multiple) POTS?

(As I said, I really did try to google this… I really did…)

Thanks…

Eric

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Hi

There are many multiport fxo gateways, Patton, Sangoma?vega, Grandstream to mane a few, It sort of comes down to budget really :smile:

We normally use patton, but have in teh past used Vega one’s but the firmaware want to good for the UK market and they used to suffer with delivery issues.

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Thanks, I was Googling on everything I could think of except “FXO Gateway”. :smile: