Thanks for taking the time -- you seem to confirm my fears about choppy audio due to high latency on virtual machines... :-) My site is going to be streaming a lot of audio via red5 servers (internet) and running an IVR using freeswitch Thanks, Sidharth On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Randy Andrade <randy.andrade@gmail.com>wrote:

While I can't really speak to a hosted Xen setup, I ran freeswitch on a premise-based ESXi system rather successfully for a period of time. I did end up moving it to a dedicated hardware box, however, due to the issues with (slightly) choppy audio, and my biggest issue, the sender --> receiver latency whenever someone would speak. The latter might not be an issue, if you're just using it for an IVR, however what I did find to be wonderful was how easy the migration was. I literally just installed the same OS on my hardware system, built & compiled FS (with the same options / modules), then copied the entire /conf directory from my VM to the hardware system and restarted FS there. I should also note that all other variables (hostname, IP, etc) remained the same between the VM and the hardware box.

Randy

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Sidharth Kshatriya < sid.kshatriya@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Dear All,

I'm interested in installing Freeswitch on Xen servers (e.g. linode.comor slicehost or maybe even Amazon EC2). I'll be purchasing a few SIP trunks to my freeswitch installation and running an an IVR system there.

I'd like to know whether this is a recommended or desirable thing to do. I've heard that the latency on Xen can be bad for "real time" applications like IVRs. Don't want to install freeswitch on my server and later hear choppy voice on the IVR!! :-)

Thanks,

Sidharth

-- Sidharth Kshatriya www.sidk.info

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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

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@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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