Virtualization
About
Virtualized servers continue to grow in popularity because they save physical space and electrical power. However:
Many FreeSWITCH installations have been successfully deployed on virtual environments. Because virtual hosts vary widely in performance and services that they offer and because your application will have its own specific needs, you must test your specific combination of virtual host and FreeSWITCH application. For example, a large video conference server will have different requirements than a voice transit switch. Ask the FreeSWITCH community for guidance and experiences to help you choose.
If you administer your own corporate data center where you control resource allocation of virtual hosts, then be certain to allocate sufficient memory and CPU to your particular FreeSWITCH™ application. After all, FreeSWITCH™ is free, so give it a good home.
The key to success on a VM is making sure that the timing source from the hardware is shared to the guest VM. Some, like vmware, do virtual timing which is not good enough.
Child Pages
Testimonials
As we have no hard and fast rules about the best way to virtualize FreeSWITCH, real experiences from community members might guide you.
OpenVZ
To speed you on your way to building a new FreeSWITCH installation the FS developer team has prepared an OpenVZ container complete with all necessary libraries and dependencies:
http://files.freeswitch.org/openvz/
The default root password is 'freeswitch' so PLEASE change this before proceeding.
Then follow the standard procedure for installing FreeSWITCH or follow the motd instructions displayed when you log in to your new container and you will be up and running in no time flat.
if your FS runs with high traffic please use the default template in
/etc/vz/conf/ve-unlimited.conf-sample
Report issues with the container ONLY at https://jira.freeswitch.org/browse/FSVIRT
SmartOS
Detailed instructions for building a FreeSWITCH installation are listed on the SmartOS page.
Xen
Some users on irc report good results Xen virtual host.
Microsoft Hyper-V
Hyper-V virtual host. Updated contributions welcome.
See Also
Wikipedia OS-level virtualization article
FreeSWITCH performance dialer — Simple dialer example
ESL conference dialer —Dials specified destinations, adds them to a conference bridge, waits for moderator; can be used to load-test virtual FS instances
VoIP Q.O.S. probe — Voice quality probe for end-to-end measurement of jitter and packet loss