On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Jeff LaCoursiere <j...@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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