I have found some old posts on running FreePBX in VMware and there are a lot of different opinions. I would like to get an updated string going on running FreePBX 5.211 plus with Asterisk 11 plus in a VM environment.
Our sites have anywhere from 100 to 600 Polycom handsets.
I know there isn’t much of an issue for small sites (10 handsets) but before I go through all of the trouble and moving one of our sites to VMware I would like to know, can it handle it with the newer versions of Asterisk and FreePBX.
What are the pit falls, etc…
They say there are some issues with fax quality.
I have FreePBX 12 running on VMware eXSI. It’s not in production yet, but it seems to have passed all the tests: inbound and outbound calling both local and long distance, and even faxing seems to work. I won’t know until a few weeks from now if something doesn’t work though. But so far I’m not worried.
However, I AM using SIP. I heard that Asterisk and VMware and hardware cards do not get along. So I am not using any PRI card for this machine, but am receiving SIP directly from the ISP.
I have ongoing issues with conferences with the FreePBX systems I have running in Hyper-V. I also have an intermittent issue that happens when the FreePBX VM is paused for snapshotting/backup; sometimes it stops responding when it is unpaused and I have to run an amportal restart to get it working again.
I got strong feedback from support to not virtualize for these and other reasons.
I have a customer that has 8 sites all running in Esxi. They use SIP gateways to interface to PSTN and backup using VEEM. They have had no issues at all. If things get screwy they can then restore a snapshot and all is back in minutes. They also have a saved VHD with a barebones setup for each site that can be pushed in at any time.
I’ve run FreePBX Distro on ESXi at six sites, all small offices (15 and fewer extensions) and everything has always worked just fine.
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We are also running SIP directly from our provider (Verizon). How many clients will you have?
I am also curious if you will have any issues with recordings and voicemails.
Are you running in a VMware farm with three or more hosts?
What hardware settings are you going to use for FreePBX server?
We have about 50 polycom phones - half of them are over an MPLS (sort of like a VPN). Nobody has reported any trouble with voicemail or recordings, although I don’t think anybody uses the dictation features.
I am running VMWare EsXi 5.5 with VMWare Essentials on a Dell PowerEdge R620 that has 32GB RAM and one CPU (Intel Xeon E5-2640) with 12 cores. That host hosts also a Windows Server 2012.
The VM running FreePBX 12 with Asterisk 11 is provisioned with 8GB RAM, thinly provisioned on an HDD, and using 6 virtual cores (that’s overkill, I know, but I have the resources to spare).
We have been running in this configuration now for 3 months. At this point, I cannot say that I have any troubles whatsoever resulting from using VMWare. Our former configuration used PRI on a dedicated box and I cannot notice any differences in quality.