Does anyone have experience with installing Asterisk using VMWare and are there any issues to be addressed or best practices for installation, thanks in advance and all the best David
We’re running Asterisk 13 on Ubuntu under VMWare ESx - it’s under the control of our own conferencing application written in .Net, and using ARI as the interface. The dialplan, therefore, is extremely simple - it just hands control to the the .Net box, which is also a VM. At the moment our wonderful ISP has given us a 2-machine cluster, which is running the two VMs, so the impact of other VMs on performance is negligible to non-existent.
Our VM setup is:
[ul]VM8
4-core CPU
8GB RAM[/ul]
Everything works incredibly well, but recently we’ve been experiencing what look like segfaults which lock up the whole Asterisk box. There seems to be no common event which triggers them, which is quite worrying. We’re now rebuilding, enabling backtracing and verbose logging, just to check that we didn’t mess anything up on the Asterisk configuration. Asterisk loading seems not to be implicated - this has only happened four times in three months of daily use, and three of those times were under very light load (less than 5 connections). Unfortunately the other was on a live business conference. It’s a very good job we had a backup and the audience could dial back in easily.
So, the answer is that it’s nearly perfect, but not quite perfect enough for our business use for the time being. If the rebuild doesn’t produce better results, we’re going to use a dedicated hosted box.
We are also running Asterisk (Version 13.5) with VMware and never had any problems.
We make thousands of calls per day. We had all kind of problems (oneway audio,core crash,external hardware failures etc…) but in the end it was never related to Asterisk being virtualized.
Tips:
Keep vmware tool up to date.
Use directmedia=yes (peer to peer) if you can, so the load on the server is minimal.
Our system:
CPU : Quadcore Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2650
RAM : 8 GB
HDD : 35 GB
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