[*] [Fwd: Re: [on-asterisk] asterisk (trixbox) on xen]

[John Lange]

I'm forwarding this from another list because I believe someone was
asking if Asterisk will run on a Virtual machine.

The hardware is not supported but with an external PSTN gateway its
possible.


> > I figured I would share my experience running trixbox on xen (which is a virtualization technology 
> > for those who may not know - http://www.xensource.com/xen/). I originally had a little celeron 350 
> > running asterisk at home quite well. I upgraded my main workstation and decided that the older 
> > motherboard/CPU could be used as an interesting little project to consol idate the [really] old 
> > hardware I had running various servers - file, web, asterisk, etc. The hardware: AMD 1800+ 
> > (1500 Mhz), 768 MB RAM, couple of hard drives. I performed a very basic installation of Ubuntu 
> > breezy and installed and configu red the xen binary installation. I knew I wanted some flexibility 
> > with the disk layout, so I created a metadevice and used lvm to slice it. More information on the 
> > xen installation is at: http://phorkar.blog-city.com/xen_install.htm for those interested in the gory 
> > details.
> > 
> > Once I had xen and the first virtual machine running it was time to install trixbox. I wanted to use 
> > the default cd installation instead of installing centos by hand and then adding trixbox so I used 
> > vmware player to perform an installation of trixbox from a cd-image. Once the installation was 
> > working and I had tested it a little bit, including connecting some soft phones, I tarred up the file 
> > system within vmware (in single user mode - i.e. asterisk , mysql and friends downed), copied it to 
> > a new partition on the xen server, untarred it and tweaked a couple of things (new IP address, 
> > etc), defined a new xen virtual machine definition file and booted it. There were a few hiccups but 
> > they were fairly easy to resolve and next thing I knew, I was running asterisk on xen.
> > 
> > I use a Sipura spa-3000 for pstn integration so I didn't have to worry about integrating a PCI card 
> > into the mix. This does mean that I am without conference capabilities (I haven't managed to get 
> > ztdummy compiled and running happily but I haven't tried too hard), but for my installation, that's 
> > not a big deal. I have now been running exclusively on the xen install for about six months and 
> > have been very happy with it. I met my goal of consolidating some older equipment into a single 
> > server and have had zero problems with trixbox running this way. The hardware is running three 
> > virtual machines: 1) trixbox 2) an external web server with php, mysql and a few goodies and 3) 
> > an internal web server. The hardware apea rs that it could handle more virtual machines but I 
> > have allocated all the RAM - I am sure if I added more memory that I could boot at least two other 
> > virtual machines. I have successfully upgraded to trixbox 1.1.1 using the trixbox update script. 
> > My telephone IP network is (mostly) on a dedicated subnet and the xen host has multiple network 
> > cards and is routing between the two subnets - this wasn't so much by design as by necessity as I 
> > didn't have en ough free ports on my switch at the time but I did have a dual port Intel NIC kicking 
> > around.
> > 
> > So, if you've been thinking about using xen to run an asterisk installation take this as my positive 
> > experience in so doing.Of course, in most commercial installations this may not be the best 
> > option for a variety of valid reasons, but fo r a home installation its great.
> > 
> > One of my next projects is to see if I can integrate some high availability into my installation, that 
> > is, have two computers each running xen be able to keep the filesystems in sync and take over a 
> > downed virtual machine in the case of a failur e (or for maintenance): since my asterisk installation 
> > just needs an IP address, I should be able to bounce it around the network without too much 
> > trouble.
> > 
> > --
> > sacha
> > 
> 
> 
> ********************************************************
> Peter MacFarlane, ACP
> Network Administration &  Programming     
> Target Call Center/ Message Centre P.E.I.  
> ********************************************************
> 
> 
> 
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