I

It depends on how much resources your virtual machine has. It seems to be small pbx and they would be fine on a virtual machine. I would recommend Xen over Vmware because of performance, check virtualization on the Elastix Wiki.

Regards,

Rafael

I appreciate your input!!! Thank you very much!

Xen isn't much of an option for me right now as the servers are already loaded with VMWare Esx.

I may still play with it in vmware and see how it does, but I'll not hold my breath

In googling around it seems that there are some issues with sound quality with VMware/Exlastix, so I think I'm going to go ahead and try it on a standalone PC and see what I can come up with.

Thanks again for your help!

yes, there are issues with asterisk and timing on vm's. you are probably better putting it on a spare box and testing it.
you don't need much of one to run it and at least you can count out the vm side if you do run into sound issues etc

Does anyone know if ESXi works better (read:reliably/sound quality) then VMWare Server 1.0x on Windows or linux?

I am in a similar situation:

I got a branch office setup with a dedicated Elastix server that connects to our main office Asterisk PBX.

I need to setup another branch office for 4 staff and terminate 1-2 POTS lines to that office for local call access. I also need a Windows server at the branch, but can't afford to put an extra machine in. Can I run a VM manager on top of Elastix. What is the recommended?

What about the other way, if I run Elastix in a VM, how can Elastix in the VM access a Wildcard TDM400P Board?

Or, returning back to the question of tfunk; what are the options to terminate a POTS line externally and feed it into Elastix?

Looking forward to any comments.

I don't think your going to like this...

I'm not sure that there is a way to run it in vmware and have it be reliable. Not just Elastix, mind you, but any Asterisk based system.

I have heard success with people using Xex, if that is helpful at all.

For what it's worth, I gave up on it and bought a cheep dell server and a PCI card and called it a day. There is no way to us an internal card with a virtual guest

For external devices that provide pots connectivity google for SIP ATA that should produce some usable results.

Good Luck!


Tfunk

Just so that this thread does not have a "VMWARE does not work" flavour to it, just thought I would pass some further information.

VMWare is usable, however, this is based on using Elastix on Workstation VMWARE and Server VMware, not ESX.

You need to use external POTS/E1/T1/GSM units to function with VmMare.

Next the main sound issue with VMWare particularly comes down to the hardware. There is no manual which tells you what does and doesn't work. As are not placing any Digium/Sangoma/pika etc hardware into the box, we are relying on ZTdummy timing. What this means is that in some cases, some hardware cannot provide a reliable timing source for ZTDummy, so what chance has VMware got with its extra abstraction layer. However now that I have said that, their is quite a lot of hardware that works well. My test systems works well with no sound issues, but have tried it on other boxes with issues. It does not always relate to the more you pay for the board, the better your chance either. It can also depend on the drive controllers, the IRQ chip etc etc.

If you want to be absolutely sure about your IP PBX, provide it with a dedicated box and card. It is important that you don't have any doubts or concerns either in its current form or with future upgrades, especially as this is a customer facing system. Like most companies, they can handle outages, but as soon as that outage becomes able to be seen by the public, like most companies it is of the utmost importance.

Regards

Bob

I read some months ago in Asterisk-es google group that there are some kernel parameters that improve drastically vmware usage with asterisk.

You must edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and use the next parameters:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.1.15.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 acpi=off noapic nosmp nolapic clock=pit


BTW Bob, some days ago I read in Elastixconnection your moh streams tutorial fix. Nice job.
Don't worry about me, I don't get easily pissed off.
As I didn't get an answer I thought you might be busy.

It is funny, but Microsoft has the solution here:

support.microsoft.com/kb/918461/en-us/