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just asking to see your experience deploying sip platforms on virtual systems. So far I was running Kamailio in virtual machines and no problems, but I insisted that media servers to be on physical machines. Lately is more pressure from the market to go everything virtual.

So the question is more about having everything on virtual systems, proxy and media server, where the media server can deal with transcoding, conference rooms and IVRs.

Any strong comments pro or against?

What is your preferred virtualization system for such deployments?

I host ~120 asterisk virtual serves on OpneVZ for more than 3 years, runs great. These are business customers so they can be very demanding, allot of custom apps and such. I host up to 150 phones in virtual environment, if more is needed, I switch over to a physical server. This is just a personal preference, not limited virtually, but customers with that many or more phones usually want a dedicated server and can certainly afford the up charge.

Ensure your resources for each VM are enough for the voice apps you want to run, be cautious about disk I/O like high volume recording, database dips per call and such. I just converted my physical sip-routers to virtual about a week now on OpenVZ, so far so good.

Transcoding required higher proc and mem loads so partition resources accordingly. I do run Asterisk 10.0 conf bridge server virtual, SIP only, no need for timing interface like DAHDI. This is running well, no problem that I'm aware of, just works.

I use VirtualBox and VMware for demo systems and lab work but OpenVZ for production due to higher density you can achive per physical server.

Whatever virtualization you want to use or are comfortable with, ensure you know it backwards and forwards and what to do if it breaks and how to increase resource when needed and by all means do your lab work ahead of time. You will not be able to simulate every situation in the lab, but you can certainly stress test your environment with high call volume, disk I/O recordings, databases operations, live migration, upgrades, downgrades, backups, resource monitoring, alarm triggers, test, test, test and then test some more.

Virtualizing voice systems has been around a long time, most virt platforms can be implemented to perform well for voice, just got to do your homework.

Good luck!.

JR