PBX Hosting- "One box to rule them all"?
Submitted by acetechgroup on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 5:56am.
I was wondering, is it possible to run multiple instances of Asterisk/FreePBX on one box in such a way that one could become a sort of PBX provider and lease this out?
For example:
Company FOO has a pretty powerfully-spec'ed server (cluster, perhaps). Can this one server provide a FreePBX/Asterisk implementation for different incoming routes, (i.e. Company A's number is 123-456-7890 and Company B's # is 321-654-0987, Company C's #..etc. etc.) AND provide different management options for each number (i.e. Company A's management portal is www.foo.com/companya, Company B has a separate admin portal at www.foo.com/companyb, etc.)? Or would this need to be done with a separate implementation of trixbox for each instance?
i can see how it could maybe, possibly be hacked together (have everything run on different sockets, multiple instances of web servers pointing to different directories for content, etc.) but was wondering if there was an implemention pre-existing.
multi-tenant
Tue, 05/06/2008 - 7:52am
trixbox is not the way to do this.
You would need to spend money on systems designed to be a multi-tenant system
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+GUI
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&rls=SUNA%...
There are ways to do the
Tue, 05/06/2008 - 8:10am
There are ways to do the "Single Box" model frodo. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're looking for a single point of management with one common application, there's always a custom asterisk config with a dial-plan that will handle the multi-tenant scenario. The other option is to run Xen or VMware and put up virtual machines each running a Trixbox.
I'm a fan of both, but the coolness of moving a "live instance" from one machine to another in the virtual machine model is just uber cool. I like the fact that moving and migrating machines across a cluster is nothing more than just a simple cli command. Virtualization also allows for future expansion as you simply need to add another machine to the cluster to add capacity and reorganizing client instances is a simple matter. (like rearranging your drawers).
There are a couple of gotchas if you go the Virtualization route, but consultants (like me -
I'm actually in the process of moving all my personal machines into a Virtualization environment as we speak. I've been playing with virtualization for a while now and I can definitely tell you that the performance is definitely as good in a virtualization environment with little to no overhead, but the small price to pay (overhead) is worth 100 times itself in migration, HA, and flexibility convenience.
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Percy Kwong
www.swimminginthought.com
Member Since:
2008-05-01