FreePBX in a Cloud?

Ok, so anyone who has worked through the pain and suffering of the barely-acceptable “DRBD+Heartbeat” method of “fault tolerance” knows that “there must be an easier way”!

I know this is a little off-topic, but I am hoping that any resulting discussion will help my fellow FreePBX enthusiasts continue to develop better and better solutions using FreePBX…

So here’s my question… Does someone have a good, working example of FreePBX+Asterisk working in a private cloud environment? And if so, would you be willing to share how it was built, the components, etc.? By “cloud” I mean something like three to five physical servers that provide a single virtual machine (VM) on which Asterisk and FreePBX are installed? The best thing about this scenario is that two of the three physical servers could outright die and yet, the phone server keeps right on running. On the other hand, let’s say that a company needs to add a LOT of extensions…since the infrastructure is scalable on the fly, it’s relatively painless to add a LOT of capacity without a lot of work.

Thoughts? Opinions?

I’ve dealt a lot with Xen allowing me to divide a single machine into multiple VPS environments, but I do not yet have experience with Xen Cloud Platform.

In the spirit of TRUE open source, I am not interested in solutions which are not fully open source–so I am assuming the answer will have something to do with Xen and OpenNimbus or Eucalyptus.

Thanks!

I am curiou how scalable FreePBX is? I was always under the impression, however misguided that impression might be, that FreePBX was designed for small business and does not scale well.

Hopefully someone can chime in with a little more experience.

So far, we are managing several hundred extensions and utilizing complex dial plans and over sixty queues with FreePBX. We had to do one “tweak” that removed the non-scalable aspect of FreePBX under Asterisk 1.4 (we had to build in an Asterisk 1.6 module to decrease server load).

We’re quite excited about this software package and plan to fund substantive development to help further it in the future. (Open sourced, of course)

Thanks,
Eriks