RECOMMENDATIONS VM for production system

[OTA]

Does anyone here run PIAF/Incredible as a VM in a production environment? If so, what are you using and any thoughts/wisdom? Also, any hardware recs?

The advantages of VMs being easily backed up and hardware agnostic have a huge appeal to me. Not terribly interested in running other VMs on the same system, just looking for backup & recovery simplicity.

I have a ~2008-2009 Asterisk 1.4 PIAF system which has been faithfully chugging away. It's running on ~2004 Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers in some form for all its life. It's been through bad HDDs, bad NICs, multiple bad motherboards, but is still ticking. I do love how quickly I can recover from even the worst hardware disasters with the 2650s. Even a complete motherboard failure only took us offline for ~10 minutes. But my stash of Dell 2650s is starting to dry up, so I'm figuring it's time to move to something newer. Debating whether to go with server hardware again or go to something smaller/more power efficient like a NUC.

 

[KNERD]

I can't anyone not using virtual machines these days.
Making a snapshot of the system is great. Have a crash, or got hacked? Just restore the backed up snapshot saved before the incident occurred.

Need to move to a new machine, or duplicate the machine? Done in mere moments.

 

[jerrm]

The only thing I run on bare metal are desktops. Even if it is a single instance, with no plans to add another instance.

I was a VERY early adopter of Intel virtualization, deploying production workloads on the very first versions of VMware GSX and ESX back in 2001 (actually before that) when everyone else thought I was nuts (I was, but not for using virtualization).

 

[MacNix]

1. if this is something you are planning to use anywhere other than a playbox in your basement (ie, you're gonna use it in the real world and people are going to depend on it), spend $100 for a box on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VBNSO8U/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

you can usually get this (or something close to it) used on amazon for $80-100.. throw a small SSD (16gb or 32gb), a 4gb RAM card, and you're done.. it'll take you longer to create and install a VM than to assemble this and start it up. i've got a half dozen of this exact unit running in various locals without a hiccup.... ever. extremely efficient in terms of power...

2. I'd recommend (if this is a production/professional use situation) considering a straight FreePBX, as opposed to PBXiaf. for a handful of reasons....

 

[ksDevGuy]

We have run Hyper-V (newest releases install without issue, slight hang issue on an automated reboot - just shutdown/restart instead!) very successfully. Previously ran VirtualBox with good success too.

 

[KUMARULLAL]

I use proxmox *(KVM) in production without any issues for years. With automated backup schedule it can be restored in minutes. Very happy with it.

 

[krzykat]

I've been using prox as well for years without incident. Ready to deploy a new VM box and wondering ..

which virtualization to use now?

 

[ksDevGuy]

VMWare & Hyper-V seem to dominate the commercial space these days (we do both, although are trending toward Hyper-V for the all MS aspect given most deploy Windows servers in business environments typically). Stay away from Xenserver as it retreats to cloud only use (so Citrix has directed it). As for Xen & other Linux options I will leave to others to comment beyond the VMWare ESXi (free) obvious option.

 

[ou812]

I have used Proxmox on my last 3 production systems and I too love it, along with the automatic backup's of VM's I added S3cmd and transfer backup's automatically to a Amazon bucket for safe keeping.

Gary

 

[atsak]

Several Hyper V in production . . .

 

[MrBostn]

Running as a guest under 2012R2 with the HyperV role for 3 years with about 80 Snom 710 phones. Not sexy looking but work well. Oh and my pbxinaflash connects to a Sangoma Vega 100G to connect our PRI.

 

[GomezAddams]

ESX and HyperV both have significant advantages and disadvantages for small installs

ESXi is lightweight (I mean really lightweight - I have 5.1 running on a Pentium D machine with 3GB RAM. It runs my firewall, PBX, and a server 2003 instance). ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 will run on pretty much any 64 bit CPU. It is simple to install and configure. You can be up and running in 15 minutes.

On the other hand, ESXi is picky about NICs and SATA controllers. Versions up to and including 5.1 include drivers for various cheapo unsupported NICs and SATA controllers. At version 5.5, VMWare removed all of the unsupported drivers, but there are hacks for replacing them. Now that VMWare has had to release the source code for their drivers (since they are derived from linux), some gurus have started to create third party drivers. Almost none of the cool third party backup utilities work with ESXi (they require changed-block notification which you only get with vCenter). GhettoVCB (and its various cousins) are pretty much the standard for backups.

HyperV 2012 has a free version. Since every oddball NIC and SATA controller has a windows driver, you are pretty much covered. There are lots of free third party tools for backing up virtuals. Free HyperV includes many features like clustering that you have to pay for with ESX (whether small installs would need any of these features is debatable).

On the third hand, HyperV free is server core, meaning there is no GUI. Configuring a server core box is not a trivial exercise (but there are free tools out there to help). HyperV isn't exactly lightweight. Add 1GB just for the Hypervisor. HyperV requires support for most of the latest virtualization features from the CPU and BIOS. Lastly, getting free HyperV to work outside a Windows domain environment is a PITA. There are dozens of security settings that must be changed on the server and the windows workstation you are running the admin console from. Again, there are tools that can help.

 

[jerrm]

Almost none of the cool third party backup utilities work with ESXi (they require changed-block notification which you only get with vCenter). GhettoVCB (and its various cousins) are pretty much the standard for backups.

This is my biggest gripe with ESXi. I understand the marketing reasons backup was restricted, just not sure the logic holds up. Backup really is the ONLY reason I consider HyperV for smaller installs. Seems like they wouldn't want folks looking outside the VMware family.

 

[henry]

Does anyone here run PIAF/Incredible as a VM in a production environment?

My oldest setup runs on a retired Dell PowerEdge 1950 (1U server) with 4GB of RAM (some 10 years old).
Completely off the grid. Serving about two dozen people (the IT guys telephone network)...
Running ESXi 5.5 off of a USB key. Two mirrored 146GB drives. 40GB PBX + one Win VM.

Once had to re-install ESXi... Forgot the root password...
Re-installation took about 10 minutes (use fast USB sticks!)
Attaching the existing datastore, adding the PBX VM to inventory and starting it took another 3...

RE: Backups
If you can afford to shut the server down, then this is easy.
Copy the VMDK and VMX file to external storage (~half an hour) and start the VM again.
If the server gets stolen, blows up or just disappears in any form, get another ESXi host,
just copy those two files back, right-click the VMX file, Add to Inventory and you are back in business...

If you can't afford to shut the VM down, you'll need something like Veeam Free Edition.
That will be able to backup a running VM but will need the non-free ESXi version.

There are "free tools" to plug the right keys when registering ESXi and use Veeam Free...

EDIT
Here is a good discussion about backing up ESXi Free
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...ry-for-esxi-free-edition?page=1#entry-2612477
Keep in mind that the free backup tools don't support automation; everything is done manually...

 

[dicko]

KVM under any flavor of linux and using QCOW2 disks can snapshot any system running or not in a minute or two , do it under a cluster of ProxMox and failover of an active PBX (of any flavor) is a few seconds, restore is a few minutes, no down-time ever needed. (and it's free as in opensource/beer and you can do it all in a gui fashion)

 

[rjaiswal]

KVM under any flavor of linux and using QCOW2 disks can snapshot any system running or not in a minute or two , do it under a cluster of ProxMox and failover of an active PBX (of any flavor) is a few seconds, restore is a few minutes, no down-time ever needed. (and it's free as in opensource/beer and you can do it all in a gui fashion)

I've always wondered how well asterisks ran under KVM. From my understanding, there was no good timing source for dahdi under KVM.

 

[jerrm]

GhettoVCB is easy enough to automate for ESXi. Full VM backups and restores aren't a problem. I don't care about a GUI at all and am generally happy with it as a solution as far as it goes.

What I miss in ESXi with GhettoVCB are incremental VM backups.

 

[dicko]

Couple of points,

Asterisk no longer requires dahdi dummy or otherwise, the kernel based timing and the confbridge app are fine,

If you for any reason want dahdi hardware for timing or using FXO/FXS/PRI/etc. then I suggest that you run dahdi on the host machine and pass the channels to your various (or single) PBI with "dynamic ethernet" to the underlying machine's dahdi, it just needs layer 2 network infrastructure and works on most any virtualization platform that is not "network impaired (read microstiff here ) " neither does it need hardware PCI passthrough virtualization (VTX . . .)

KVM of course does "incremental" snapshots on QCOW2, but kind of pointless for a PBX given how efficient the snapshot works and the underlying nature of a PBX use of timely data.

If you want a "rock solid" backup state of your vmails/recordings, look into 'rsnapshot'

 

[GomezAddams]

RE: Backups
If you can afford to shut the server down, then this is easy.
Copy the VMDK and VMX file to external storage (~half an hour) and start the VM again.
If the server gets stolen, blows up or just disappears in any form, get another ESXi host,
just copy those two files back, right-click the VMX file, Add to Inventory and you are back in business...

If you can't afford to shut the VM down, you'll need something like Veeam Free Edition.
That will be able to backup a running VM but will need the non-free ESXi version.

There are "free tools" to plug the right keys when registering ESXi and use Veeam Free...

You don't have to shut the VM down. There are esx command line tools to create a snapshot, and copy the snapshot off to another vmdk file. For non windows VMs, this gives you crash-consistent backups. For Windows VMs (with VMWare guest additions), the snap command percolates up through VMWare tools to Windows. Windows then coordinates with apps (like SQL Server) to get disk files in a state such that the snapshot is fully consistent.

There is a shell script called GhettoVCB that wraps this command in all sorts of bash goodness to create a fairly robust VM backup solution. The only down side is that the destination for the copied vmdk file must be an ESX datastore. That means that if you want the backup to reside somewhere other than the ESX box itself, you must use an NFS or iSCSI datastore. If you have Windows servers or unix/linux servers, or some sort of NAS that does NFS, Bob's your uncle. If all you have are Windows workstation, then you need a *robust* third party NFS client. HaneWIN NFS works well for this, and is cheap ($30 if memory serves).

If you install GhettoVCB from the available VIB (esx's software packaging scheme), it creates a crontab entry to run GhettoVCB once a day (note if you go down this path: ESX uses GMT as its timezone, so adjust your crontab times accordingly).

There are also some Windows based programs that ssh into the ESX server, start GhettoVCB (which writes to a temp location), then uses scp to copy the resulting vmdk files from the temp location to a workstation.

 

[GomezAddams]

Oh,and if you want your ESX 5.5 or 6 server to recognize all the funky, non-supported NICs and SATA adapters that 5.1 used to recognize, check out this site: http://www.v-front.de/. He makes it pretty much duck soup.