Odd, I had a lot of problems with ESXi. If I setup the asterisk server with just a firewall and asterisk server everything ran fine, Isolated nics for each app and network (internal, DMZ and external), worked fine, but as soon as you load more VM machines things started to go sideways. Call quality of recordings went weird, G729 connections started to act like there was a lot of jitter on the line.
I tried loading a test server on our ESX cluster and it was much much worse (60+ VM's). Also with ESXi you can't add PRI/PSTN cards, everything must be external. I couldn't see much point in running a production asterisk server as and VM on ESX - Handy for testing but not for production. I have also tried using ESX as a media server for Video and once more than 6 Vm were running on the ESX cluster video would get choppy for 1080P streams, it's like the network resource pools are being shared, even when nics are isolated to the specific VM. Robert Brock Telecom Administrator, MKS Inc., www.mks.com Waterloo, ON, Canada Tel: 519-883-3243 or 800-265-2797 x3243 Fax: 519-884-8861 -----Original Message----- From: Dave Donovan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 9:27 PM To: Asterisk Users Group Subject: Re: [on-asterisk] VM ESXi on Asterisk Production Platforms. On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:34 AM, Reza - Asterisk Consultant <[email protected]> wrote: > Has anyone in here worked hands on with ESXi and Asterisk? Would like to > hear your input and benchmarks, along with recommendations of other > alternatives that you may have placed at your data centre running Asterisk. > > Do you prefer ESXi or other alternatives? If alternatives, then why? Reza, This is a timely post. We just deployed Asterisk (PBX in a Flash) on our ESX 3.5 platform at our Mississauga office. ESXi is just a skinnier version of ESX. It's a bit early to say much about long-term stability, but we've had no problems with Asterisk since deployment. Fingers-crossed. During testing, we found we had choppy/poor quality audio on playback() operations like autoattendant. It wasn't as bad with voicemail messages so we installed native sounds, hoping that avoiding GSM-ULAW transcoding would fix it. It was improved but not great. We applie a kernel patch to resolve timing issues that caused the choppy audio. Now it's smooth as silk. Info on that patch can be found here: http://pbxinaflash.com/vm/ We ran the code exactly as it appears near the bottom of the page. The only other thing we had to do was edit grub.conf to make the new kernel the default one. I imagine that you're looking at a hosted type of application so, unfortunately, I can't tell you much about scaling since we're running only one Asterisk instance and it's the only thing in the high priority resource pool. It doesn't have to contend with any resource-intensive guests on the same machine. We chose VMware a couple of years ago for several reasons not related to Asterisk. Since then I've heard good things about other platforms like VirtualBox and Xen but I have no first hand experience with them. Good luck with your project, Dave --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
