I am look for feedback from the community on the viably of FreePBX (2.8 or newer)on VMware ESXi 4.1. I plan to have 150+ phones register to the server and would like to hear if anyone has an environment were they have done this. My host server is a reliable and fast unit with dual Xeon CPUs and large RAID5 array. I may run several other FreePBX servers on the same host so I can break apart companies or business units. This way if I need to do maintenance to one server I will only affect those on the server. Note - All our PSTN lines are done via SIP trunks
My production system has about 100 users, dealing 1500 calls/day.
I have installed AsteriskNow as a Virtual Machine on top on VMWare server 2.0 using a trivial 500 euros PC.
The CPU is a trivial Core 2 Duo, the RAM amount is 2 GB
The host operating system is Windows XP.
I never had a performance problem in 6 months of production.
Using a VM, of course, even on a dedicated PC offers great flexibility (VM backup, snapshot before upgrading, etc).
So I don’t see problems in using a VM on your powerful server.
Good luck.
Stefano
I have tried FreePBX on ESXi and in truns very well, but never with that amount of users you are mentioning, we have 30 users max and the activity is normal, not overloaded…of course having a dedicated server is the optimum, you can get any PC to run it, you don’t need sophisticated servers…