[Freeswitch-users] Is it a good idea to deploy Freeswitch on Xen Instances/Virtual Machines?

[Steven Ayre]

The issue with running within a virtual machine is that your guest OS has no
control over timing. If another guest or the host does a lot of CPU or I/O
that can mean your guest can get blocked for an unpredictable amount of time
making maintaining a steady timer difficult. FS needs a reliable timer for
its RTP media to work reliably.

However having said that, if the server (both host and guests) isn't highly
loaded you probably won't have any major issues - timing will probably be
'reliable enough' and your jitter buffers will hide some of the jitter
you'll get so that you don't notice some of the more minor timing glitches.

I have run FS within virtual machines (VirtualBox) for testing purposes
without problems, and with problems. I don't run FS in a VM on any of my
production servers and wouldn't - but I do know others do.

OpenVZ takes a different approach to virtual machines - rather than
emulating an entire virtual server it partitions off your host system.
Everything is still running on the same system with the kernel knowing
exactly what's going on so timing is far more reliable. OpenVZ is the way
I've seen the FS developers recommend you run it if you must run it within a
VM, but that doesn't mean it won't work under Xen/EC2/etc.

-Steve




On 3 May 2011 23:31, Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines <
chad at apartmentlines.com> wrote:

>
> On May 3, 2011, at 11:39 AM, Brad Mina wrote:
>
> > The testing I've done with linode specifically have been pretty good.
> I've not seen any major problems with audio quality. However, my tests were
> not intensive and I did not do any call-volume testing.
>
> i use it Xen for testing setups, but would definitely not recommend it for
> any production environment that involves a lot of calls.  i used a Xen
> instance for a get-out-the-vote campaign last november, and had repeated
> issues with choppy audio, even with almost all of the hardware resources
> assigned to that single Xen instance.
>
> my understanding is that OpenVZ has been used successfully in these
> circumstances, so you might want to check that out if you're serious about
> pushing a lot of calls.
>
> chad
>
>
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