Virtualization
Submitted by sb020397 on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 5:14pm.
Alright guys. VMware Virtualization.... we have several customers that are small offices that want in on the IP technology. They want us to host it for them. They have seen clients of ours that of trixbox and have heard the buzz going around since we've started installing them. We want to host these. We want to put a box in our data center and use xensource or vmware virtualization. We've seen with Switchvox that with a dual processor quad core and 8 gig of ram they supposedly can handle 200 concurrent calls on a box running 20 instances of their software. If this is the case why can't it be done with trixbox pro.
I need some input. I have built a test server. I've been told though and this worries me that we need a Sangoma card even if we aren't using analog lines for timing. Is this true? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. We love Trixbox PRO and want to host this badly but it's not reasonable if we need a server for each 4 person office.
Even switchvox will have
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 5:49pm
hosted
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 7:41pm
the VOIPNow from 4PSA solves the timing issue under OPENVZ they have a zaptel rpm for the host which is shared by the guest.
.............NOT FREE.......
http://www.4psa.com/index.php?pcat=products&pag=4psavoipnow
Kerry, I have a lot of
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 8:30pm
Kerry, I have a lot of respect for you. But are you sure about your information on this? Have you tested Switchvox's multi-tenant solution? Though I have not tested it myself, everything I have ever gotten from Switchvox has worked 100% as they promised. No bugs at all. No, thats not 99% or even 99.99%... Thats 100% delivery on promises.
Its Asterisk that has
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 10:47pm
Its Asterisk that has inherent problems under virtualization, I have not heard that they have solved it specifically for switchvox. I hope they have and they push the fixes into the open source product as it would be a HUGE improvement in overall quality. Personally, I am just not sold on the whole virtualization concept myself with hardware being as cheap as it is today. I just bought a Dell Inspiron Quad Core machine with 3gb RAM and a 500gb hard drive for $460 brand new, after tax and shipping. Why would I go through the hassle of running VM when I can build a server that can run hundreds of concurrent calls for under $500? I just don't see the value there.
Servers are cheap,
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 4:18am
Servers are cheap, collocation space is very expensive. So is managing multiple servers.
If you are going to be serious about being a Service Provider it would be the way to go.
As you know we decided to put a trixbox on customer premise as a CPE. If somebody wants to provide a fully managed hosted service these options may be compelling. They are certainly reasonably priced.
I would put a session border controller in front of it before I started selling service.
Scott
--
Scott
aka "Skyking"
virtualization
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 8:27am
Asterisk does virtualization very well, the timing issues are solved by allowing the guest access to /dev/zap not hard to do.
The benfit of virtualization is Backup / deploy / upgrade, just think how many hours a day are wasted on updates which break something, if it is a VM rollback is a breeze and FAST.
As the world dumps PSTN (yes the ole phone system will be gone in a few years) we all will be using VOIP. So the world of hosted PBXes is growing in leaps and bounds.
A hardware box is old school
virtualization is the new wave, so polish up your surf board and catch the wave.
With SPC / Nextel / google group becoming Clearwire (Wi-max) phone service (VOIP) over wi-max is right around the corner.
Speed up or Move over or get run down.
well said
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 5:05pm
Right now we manage web servers, sql servers, exchange servers and now that we've gotten into the phone business I don't want all these boxes. We rent a cab in a data center I don't want to rent another. Virtualization is a must. I think trixbox pro is fantastic and the ease of deployment is very nice. If I can put 10 servers in 1 and that's 1/2 of what switchfvox is doing than i would be very pleased. It also opens the door for handling smaller companies. Reduces their cost as well.
I've tried trixbox pro in vmware under windows 2003 server, call quality good. Audio quality terrible in voice menus. In VMware ESX it's much improved but still lacks quality. It's not acceptable to me at least. Tomorrow I will try it in xensource.
Somebody needs to get moving cause this is definately the wave of the future. It's not the cost of the box, it's the cost of maintening and hosting multiple boxes! I wouldn't run anything on a $460 dollar server either. Sorry.
Here's my opinion on it. If
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 5:49pm
Here's my opinion on it. If your customers do not have a point-to-point connection with MPLS into the same data center their virtual PBX is in, you are doing them a great injustice. They are bound to have frequent problems, even if you figure out how to virtualize. That's my qualitative analysis.
Here's my quantitative analysis:
A while back, I did a break-even financial analysis on hosted vs. premise PBXs based on some of the larger host outfit's revenue model and premise Asterisk-based PBX pricing to the customer. The premise PBX model ANNIHILATED the hosted model in a ridiculously short period of time relative to the acceptable break-even period for business-related transactions. The numbers prove it is a no-brainer decision for the end customer to choose a premise PBX over a hosted model.
Anyone who is interested can PM me and I'll send you the Excel spreadsheets. If anyone here comes across a hosted provider you are about to lose a sale to, PM me and I'll bet I can help you with a financial analysis that finds the chink in their "value armor". I'll go toe-to-toe against these hosted companies any day of the week. Even if it looks like the sale is lost, at least I can direct the customer into a certain phone purchase so when they can't take it anymore, we can convert them over to a real solution.
Am I saying the hosted model is hopeless? Of course not, but right now given the nature of the current game ("You have an Internet connect? We have a solution for you!") and the ridiculous revenue model of these hosted operations once you get over a few extensions, I just don't see a mainstream place for them for some more years. I'll bet Google is looking at it, though, given their dark fiber acquisitions, data centers, and processing density.
Believe me, I know I will eventually eat these words. But I do feel I won't be eating them for at least a few years. I look at this market long term. I remember going to telecom conferences in the in the late-nineties and early 00's and unified messaging was the craze. Most businesses still don't have it. It's just starting to become mainstream. MILLIONS of businesses will buy premise IP-PBXs in the next 5-10 years - MILLIONS. It is up to us to make sure that Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and Alcatel aren't selling the current 75% of those PBXs.
host vs inhouse
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 7:17pm
ethans,
Your a smart one but you are wrong on the host vs. premise
Many Small business owners (Mom and Pop where my bread and butter) do need nor want a onsite PBX for many reasons COST is the most important part.
There is no way the ROI on a onsite PBX will pay for it self when compared to a 30.00 a month fee for three extens and and IVR off a host multi-tentant box.
Now here where I am a pots line cost MIN 65.00 a month no fluff. no discount for added lines. until you get a T-1 at over 800.00 a month (not in the budget for Mom N Pop)
Now with a "hosted box", they can port the number to vitelity.net and using the failover to say a cell phone (in case the Inet is down), A few hundred bucks in Ip phones and they are good to go.
Now unlike MANY VOIP deployments My "Mom and Pop shop" is saving money on the 3 rd month.
So as the customer is now totally VOIP the in house box has lost any advantage it had
Each deployment is different, each company has different needs / standards
In these times COST is one of the biggest things a SoHo will look at.
I billed $ 130.00 an hour I could setup a server in 30 mins and setup the three or so extens in another 30 mins...BAM PBX.
I will not get in my truck and drive to a customer without charging $ 130.00 much less do anything close as to deploy a PBX onsite.
It is about the needs of the customer NOT the needs of my hip pocket.
I still get calls about helping companies setup OPENVZ servers a for hosting boxes.
If you have a need for a multi-tentant box 4PSA has a good deal ( $ 1000.00 unlimited extens)
I help setup a onsite OPENVZ box with five PBXes on it for a business incubator services company, They provide office / staff and PBX service for small business to help them get started.
they would have spent over 60,000.00 on phone systems, instead they spent less than 18,000.00 up front and 2,500.00 the second year ($ 2,500.00 covered onsite training of the IT staff and adding a PBX plus some phones)
now to be CLEAR 4PSA VOIPNow is NOT Trixbox it is a lean PBX without any of the Fluff you will not have any weather / remind me / TTS funny voices and so on.
BUT you do get a rock soild PBX.
Ethan is correct. We are an
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 7:34pm
Ethan is correct. We are an ISP and 7 years ago decided to add voice to our services. Our customers where either on a point to point DS-1 terminated to our DS-3's or DSL. We have a full DS-3 to the LEC and terminate our own PPPoE, our only exposure on the DSL was oversubscription by the LEC on the DSLAM.
We went all out with a Sylantro Voice Server and Iperia Voice Mail. We where using MGCP end points that supported full SLA's.
Between our expenses and the licensing model of Sylantro we tossed in the towel at 300 users and began the migration to premise PBX's. The trix server is a managed service point for us at the customer premise.
The hosted solution scaled very poorly.
We terminate our SIP providers at our colo and then use IAX2 to the customer premise device.
We are currently rolling customers to the new platform and it is working out very well.
I spent almost a year building business process around the new product.
That's where we are at today, hope this helps.
--
Scott
aka "Skyking"
Bubba -
Quote:
There is no
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 7:39pm
Bubba -
Quote:
There is no way the ROI on a onsite PBX will pay for it self when compared to a 30.00 a month fee for three extens and and IVR off a host multi-tentant box.
If that model is working for you that's great. We gave up on the under 10 extensions. Our average revenue per customer target is $500.00.
Maybe if I knew how to market 1000 $30 seats I would be more interested. It seems to cost as much to acquire a $100/mo account as it does $1000.00/mo.
Scott
--
Scott
aka "Skyking"
Bubba,
Respectfully, In
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 7:42pm
Bubba,
Respectfully, In reference to your Mom and Pops comment, I mentioned in my post "the ridiculous revenue model of these hosted operations once you get over a few extensions", which specifically addresses your Mom and Pop argument. And respectfully once again, multi-tenant is not the same as a hosted model where you are charging $X/month/extension.
IMHO, Asterisk-based solutions do not fit into a Mom and Pop model. That's where the KSU, Radio Shack 4-line phones, Vonage and hosted fit into. I can't beat Panasonic KSU pricing with an Asterisk-based solution and make enough money to make it worth while, and that is exactly why we don't sell into the KSU market. More headaches and far less margin.
Now I don't know where you are, but I thought our HQ, being in a technologically-depressed void of America in semi-rural Wisconsin, was bad. Yet we can get PRI circuits for less than 5 of your POTS lines. Maybe in your neck of the woods it is the exact opposite of ours: where we have relatively cheap PSTN capabilities, but our Internet options suck and we are 350 miles away from the nearest real NAP.
Regardless, I can still prove through a solid financial model that a 10 extension premise-based Asterisk solution can beat a hosted model at $30/extension/month any day of the week.
Thank you....
Thu, 05/15/2008 - 5:53am
You guys are awesome! I didn't expect to get so much feedback from that post. We are knew to the Phone business so we are going forward carefully investigating our options. We have found though in our 6 month existence that Trixbox Pro is a fantastic solution for our customer with 10 -100 employee's. We do have a nice market here though and lot's of mom and pop shops that can't afford nor will the pay for a onsite box. We do though have reasonable internet speeds.
For testing purposes we did a insurance company with 5 extentions. We built them a trixbox and put it in our data center. We got them a dedicated 16 x 2 roadrunner line, they have 1 line for internet, phones are on seperate network on other roadrunner line. They love it, they love the hud. The phone quality is very good. I want to do more of these but don't want 40 boxes in my colo. Bandwidth is cheap in a good colo but electricity and cabinet rental add up.
We are now tesing 4psa , we've been spoiled with the auto provisioning of Trixbox Pro. The provisioning isn't as smooth that I can see yet with 4psa. Will let you know what happens.
We found with customers on
Thu, 05/15/2008 - 8:36am
We found with customers on our hosted Sylantro switch that TWC Roadrunner links work fairly well.
One of our bandwidth providers is Level 3 and they are peered with TWC so we generally have good luck with them.
I would highly suggest you put a VPN router at the customer premise for security and management purposes. If you are going to get serious about this look at the Edgeview from Edgewater Networks. It allows you to run reports based on voice call quality.
Good luck...Scott
--
Scott
aka "Skyking"
ESX Trouble
Tue, 05/20/2008 - 9:32pm
Hello Bubba
We have been successfully using TrixBoxPro CCE on an ESX grid we have.
You mentioned there are no timing issues, we are having a couple of slight issues I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to fix.
We have our entire PBX over Fiber (to our office over Dark Fiber) and we are connected to our our ISP with a GIG-E Fiber. Call quality pretty much perfect (inbound is strange sometimes), it's all over SIP. One of the strange anomalies we are having is with call queues for example, the ringing and behavior of them are completely odd. If you call the office and it goes to a queue the ringing sounds chopping, completely strange. it could be a couple of fast rings followed by some short ones.
Are you sure there are no issues with Running Asterisk(Trixbox) on an ESX infrastructure?
Thanks so much
I have used virtualization
Mon, 06/02/2008 - 11:31am
I have used virtualization extensively but do not use features that require hard timers. The exposure is part of asterisk, as Kerry mentioned. You may not have problems today but you will eventually. I don't use VMWare for any virtualization as I prefer Xen under CentOS.
On a side note, I absolutely disagree with the notion of hosting a small business site offsite. I would be much more likely to suggest several virtual machines on hardware onsite with them. Keep in mind that for my implementations, any POTS connection would not be zaptel because that would require direct hardware access. This particular kind of virtualization has a number of advantages. You can have two identical virtual machines in a standby scenario very easily. It also facilitates copying an entire VM in its current state to a second hardware server.
I would hate for a complicated discussion of colocation and offsite setups cloud the question of virtualizing trixbox.
I too have used
Mon, 06/02/2008 - 3:10pm
I too have used virtualisation for a number of years and used both the 'FREE' VM Server and ESX server to virtualise Windows Servers. At one site with ESX server we have managed to virtualise 10 physical servers on ESX server.
Whilst not using VM versions of Trixbox in production I did for a test build up a Trixbox 2.2 server on an XP Pro Laptop (Dual Core 1.8) 1Gb RAM, 160 GB Hard Disk on Virtual Server V 1.3.
I had 2 queues 4 SIP Phones and was ble to make and receive calls with no real issues.
I have recently been doing new Virtualisations on Virtual Iron (www.virtualiron.com) They do a free version ofthe software (limit on number of VM's and vCPU's) The 30 day version has no such limits.
At $800 per physical cpu which includes HA, DR, and 6 platespins p2v conversions knocks the spots of VMWARE.
I intend downloading the latest version of Trixbox this weekend and will test it under VI.
VMware ESX
Wed, 06/04/2008 - 6:31am
I have been running trixbox Pro on VMware ESX for about 9 months or so I guess. I am just running it at home with four SIP phones. I have run it on ESX 3.0.2 and 3.5 without any issues. I am running it with 5 other VMs on a single host. I did reserve 400Mhz to the trixbox Pro VM to I did not run into any processor contention. The voice mail quality is not perfect, but still good enough for me. The sound quality of phone calls is very good considering I am doing all my calls over the internet via Vitelity. I am running on a DL360 with dual 3.8s and 5 GB of RAM.
I have no complaints or problems with running trixbox Pro under ESX. I am not doing anything fancy with it, so I cannot say you will not run into your own issues. Basic functionality does work though.
Mike
Member Since:
2007-10-25