FreePBX on Hyper-V -- Strictly for learning

General Help
1

There has been some discussion on here that I’ve seen regarding PBX in a VM. I know it can only be done under certain conditions. Our phone guy at the office isn’t very forthcoming when it comes to PBX basics and some of us would like to learn some things.

Am I able to install the Distro onto a VM simply just to get around, navigate, see some basic settings, etc.?

I won’t actually be setting up any kind of phone system or even trying connect anything to it. This will simply be for learning purposes that I want to supplement with some videos from this site.

2

Another approach is to install on a PC you have in the bottom of a closet somewhere.

3

I’ll potentially do that as well. I’m just trying to keep it mobile as best I can and putting it on my own laptop along with my desktop here at the office.

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4

I don’t see why not. I’ve got a home pbx setup with the freepbx distro.

Running on a minipc (i5 5250) with 8gb of ram. Box also serves the home firewall.

Allocated the following resources under esxi hypervisor:

1 vcpu
1 GB of ram
200 GB of hd (overkill, even 30gb would work) but I intend on recording calls
1 network adapter (VMXNET 3 driver)
Guest OS: Linux - Other 3.x or later 64bit

Of course if you want to dedicate more cpu or ram, go for it. Installation took about 30+ minutes.

5

we have run freepbx on a number of different hypervisors. vmware, hyper-v and xen to name a few. they all worked fine

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6

Thanks for the insight. Appreciate it!

7

running multiple FreePBX distros in HyperV in full production contact center, no problem (live failover works!!)

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8

Second that - we currently have over 50 machines running full production under Hyper-V - It is our preferred deployment because of the ability to have Replication - Love it!

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9

“You want to have HA live failover? VM is how you get HA failover!”

10

for what it’s worth.
Hyper V give me troubles. It’s what we run here in the office. When memory on the server is low it does a poor job of managing.
On the other hand in the data center, I run Proxmox with no issues.
If you Proxmox you get HA failover or you can just bring up VM’s on any connected server.

Please, someone, help me out. Hyper V doesn’t give you access to the kernel and you want for a production machine.

11

Memory Management is one area where you have to be careful with Hyper-V hosting of FreePBX - Twice I had a FreePBX Machine go crazy with a memory leak and take down the whole host after it exhausted the memory pool - simple fix for this though - just make sure you do a Static Memory Allocation for the FreePBX machines - then you will not have this problem.