vicidial.org

by **darryldale** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 1:58 pm

I know way back when I first started toying with the idea of a VOIP system to replace our analogue phone lines we went with TrixBox. The general consensus then was to NOT use TrixBox in a Virtual environment as there were too may "timing" issues to make it reliable.

Is anybody running a standalone ViciBox installation on Vmware Server (our production environment is still Vmware server version 1)?

If so have you noticed any issues? Recommend or not recommend?

Darryl

by **darryldale** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:07 pm

OK after doing a bit more reading the answer would be "no".

Right now I've got just the one machine running everything and only have about 10 agents but they may all be on calls at once and it seems like the general consensus is that it just doesn't scale gracefully in a virtualized environment.

By this time this year we are aiming to be big enough to need 30 agents so long term it just doesn't look like a viable solution for us.

Darryl

by **williamconley** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:14 pm

Get a dedicated Core2Quad or above. Used is fine. eBay is your friend.

by **darryldale** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:47 pm

Gotta love ebay.

I've always been partial to HP equipment (yeah yeah I know, everybody has their preferences) and have no issues buying use ML servers off of ebay.

Can get them dirt cheap and they're just like the energizer bunny (keep going and going and going).

Darryl

by **williamconley** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:58 pm

just don't blow a power supply, cuz they cost more than the server!

by **darryldale** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 3:04 pm

Knock on wood but the only thing that has ever gone in one of my HP servers is a scsi drive. Hot spare kicked in automatically and swapped the bad drive out when the replacement drive came in the next day.

Zero downtime.

Gotta love it.

Darryl

by **TroyD** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:33 am

Just thought I'd post my expierence with virtualization. I have been implementing VmWare pretty much since it came out, as I worked for one of the largest Storage solution providers in the US for IBM storage. That being said, I do run Vicidial (partially) in a Vmware environment (specifically v3 and now also V4.1 Vsphere) and I have great results, however there is 1 caviat, the dialer machine itself is physical, one reason is the need to use hardware telephony interfaces for PRI, and the other is that the resources are very stable and timing is not an issue with Zaptel, Dahdi, etc. There are some tweaks you can make to the configuration files to stabalize the resources for your vm's in the event you decide to use purely sip and do not need hardware interfaces and it runs pretty well, but for a scalable solution you can put the database and web server inside the virtual layer and leave the dialer nodes outside on the physical layer. Mind you though that our storage is fibre channel multipath and is very fast (15K rpm drives with multiple paths to the ESX servers). This makes it very scalable for us as we just add more dialer nodes when we need to add more agents. Please remember though you must have a robust system, do not try this running ESXi ontop of windows on a workstation grade machine as your results will likely not be the same as they would be with a server class machine. Summary: it can be done with the right equipment and config. Physical is the safe way though, but even there if you are resource poor, you will likely suffer. Makes a good dev environment though! We have made millions of calls without any notable issues on VmWare with the config I described.. Hope that sheds a little light...

by **randy_delgado_03** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:31 pm

@darryldale

I agree with TroyD, few weeks ago i started experimenting vicibox redux 3.1.9 64bit on ESXi 4.1 and had some troubles but finally after some research and all that, i really pulled something off. Now im virtualizing 2x WEB/DB and 5x TELEPHONY: 4 as voice gateways and 1 as the main PBX forwarding calls to the voice gateways via IAX2 trunk ...

by **TroyD** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:53 pm

randy_delgado_03 wrote:@darryldale

I agree with TroyD, few weeks ago i started experimenting vicibox redux 3.1.9 64bit on ESXi 4.1 and had some troubles but finally after some research and all that, i really pulled something off. Now im virtualizing 2x WEB/DB and 5x TELEPHONY: 4 as voice gateways and 1 as the main PBX forwarding calls to the voice gateways via IAX2 trunk ...

Randy, Just curious as to what changes you may have made to your resource pool to ensure that the machines receive constantly stable resources. I once put Trixbox on ESX and it worked very well as it was utilizing a SIP service provider, however we did note that if the resources weren't locked down and dedicated to that machine occasionally a call would sound like you were sucking in helium! Was quite cool though to be able to migrate that Virtual Machine between the Physical machines using Vmotion WHILE were holding a conversation and only hear a second of interruption! Very Kewl Stuff!

by **williamconley** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:57 pm

randy_delgado_03 wrote:@darryldale

I agree with TroyD, few weeks ago i started experimenting vicibox redux 3.1.9 64bit on ESXi 4.1 and had some troubles but finally after some research and all that, i really pulled something off. Now im virtualizing 2x WEB/DB and 5x TELEPHONY: 4 as voice gateways and 1 as the main PBX forwarding calls to the voice gateways via IAX2 trunk ...

web/db i get .. 5x telephony i was assuming to be "dialers" (agents registered and making calls to prospects) but the "voice gateway" reference throws me off there so i have to ask:

do you have agents phones registered to asterisk and in conference rooms in asterisk in virtual machine ... and if so HOW MANY on each virtual machine? and how many virtual machines do you have running on that hardware?

these stats have (so far) proven to be quite wasteful. if you have something that is NOT wasteful, I'm very interested to hear about it.

by **TroyD** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:08 pm

williamconley wrote:
randy_delgado_03 wrote:@darryldale

I agree with TroyD, few weeks ago i started experimenting vicibox redux 3.1.9 64bit on ESXi 4.1 and had some troubles but finally after some research and all that, i really pulled something off. Now im virtualizing 2x WEB/DB and 5x TELEPHONY: 4 as voice gateways and 1 as the main PBX forwarding calls to the voice gateways via IAX2 trunk ...
web/db i get .. 5x telephony i was assuming to be "dialers" (agents registered and making calls to prospects) but the "voice gateway" reference throws me off there so i have to ask:

do you have agents phones registered to asterisk and in conference rooms in asterisk in virtual machine ... and if so HOW MANY on each virtual machine? and how many virtual machines do you have running on that hardware?

these stats have (so far) proven to be quite wasteful. if you have something that is NOT wasteful, I'm very interested to hear about it.

William,
I don't intend any insult, however I would have to disagree with your "wasteful" comment as I believe that anything that provides you with something to learn from and experiment with is surely not wasteful. I wouldn't ever try to knock what someone else is doing simply because I did not get anything out of it. The really great thing about open source is the fact that others get a chance to try new things and learn from their testing and experimentation. This doesn't have to be a high performance production environment for everyone. For some its just something to learn from..Again, I mean no insult or harm from my comments...

by **randy_delgado_03** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:10 pm

@williamconley

Ok in 1 ESXi server, i have 2 vicibox installed for web/db and separately on another ESXi server the "4 voice gateways" im talking about are also vicibox installs but only acts as forwarders facing different ISP's with each private and public IP's. the other one TELEPHONY which is installed on a physical server "HP DL380 G5 intel xeon dual quad 1.6 gigz" holds the agents phones and conferences, but i only tested it for 15 agents. I tried this setup for the redunduncy and loadbalance(still on progress) on our ISP's.

by **randy_delgado_03** » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:14 pm

@TroyD

*Randy, Just curious as to what changes you may have made to your resource pool to ensure that the machines receive constantly stable resources.

What i did was reserve just enough resources for each of my VM's and calculate the resources needed based on the reference of vicibox redux installation manual.

by **gerski** » Wed Aug 24, 2011 7:28 am

@randy

Are you using vsphere? I tried running it in vspehere but 10 agents has a bad lines compare to the dedicated servere running at 60 stations. Are you using dahdi 2.3?

I tried installing vicibox but there is some error. Do you encounter this also ? What solution did you do? Thanks

by **williamconley** » Wed Aug 24, 2011 8:35 pm

randy_delgado_03 wrote:@williamconley

Ok in 1 ESXi server, i have 2 vicibox installed for web/db and separately on another ESXi server the "4 voice gateways" im talking about are also vicibox installs but only acts as forwarders facing different ISP's with each private and public IP's. the other one TELEPHONY which is installed on a physical server "HP DL380 G5 intel xeon dual quad 1.6 gigz" holds the agents phones and conferences, but i only tested it for 15 agents. I tried this setup for the redunduncy and loadbalance(still on progress) on our ISP's.

My experience to date suggests that the "purpose" behind virtualizing (besides the easy duplication and up/down time ...) is that multiple companies could then be run on the same physical server/cloud without knowledge or interaction (or theft or eavesdropping). But if the agents conferences are all on the same server ... well, that's the limiting factor (25 agents per physical box) and security risk (agents can eavesdrop on each other's conferences ... especially managers in different instances with full rights ...). So working out a solution where the security is resolved (which some have attempted ... I'm sure) still does not resolve the major issue that your bottleneck of 25 agents per server is still there on a physical server.

This could be useful for someone who has lots of realtor clients with 2-4 agents per "box", but with a room that may grow beyond that ... you're still looking at one physical server for every 25 agents and the inevitable need to BUILD a new server for every new group of 25 agents.

Separating the "web" and DB is easy (and does not need virtualization to do so, by the way, the DB can be easily segregated by using a different database name and the web can be segregated by using a different conf file, which then points to that different DB). It's the Agent Box that will need to be virtualized to make this work.

I do find the different attempts to be interesting, and it is very cool that the names of the systems and resources in use are being shared. Eventually this may lead to a breakthrough.

I'd actually love to see someone go through here and collect all the "attempts" and correlate them to see who has gotten how far in each area.

But in the end what counts is "How May Agent On Virtual Systems". In this case ... Zero because they are on the physical machine. Great for a niche market that can live with "the rest" virtualized, but for Vicidial to become virtual, it has to be the Agent box with the conferences.

by **gerski** » Thu Aug 25, 2011 8:30 am

I tried using vsphere but max 10 agents using goautodial but the voice were not so good. What if we use a USB sangoma timing? Would it solve the problem?

There is a vmware trixbox available right?

by **williamconley** » Thu Aug 25, 2011 5:00 pm

So ... if you kept your vsphere at 8 agents the sound quality was adequate? Sangoma timing may resolve the issue ... but how then do you resolve the issue of adding new virtual servers without adding actual hardware? (i suppose you could have 8 sangoma timers on each vsphere server ...?)

by **gerski** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 5:49 am

@william. Yes. But it is in preview dialing (dial next number) so it is not concurrent.

by **williamconley** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 9:05 am

! So it's "Max" 8 calls in manual dial mode. Not as impressive, but a good number to remember nonetheless. Thanks for the post.

Eight Agents and Eight Prospects ... functional system in Manual Dial Mode. Fully Virtual system? (I'm tempted to check to see if this is the "record" for a fully functional virtual ... the question is whether you could "dupe it" in the same system and put ANOTHER 8/8 box in and use that also ...?)

vicidial.org

Vicibox on Vmware server in production env. Experiences?

Vicibox on Vmware server in production env. Experiences?

VmWare

Question For Randy

Who is online