asterisk users - May 2005 - more than one company hosting their PBX on the same machine?

Did anyone try to have more than one asterisk installation on one machine?
Here's what i'm thinking, why can't amall and medium companies
outsource their
telephony service to their data provider? So the ISP could offer a service to
its clients where it hosts the servers that run asterisk at their own premises
which is usually a suitable environment for hosting servers(UPS's and very
good
network connectivity).
Summary: Is it possible to have more than one domain(as in the extensions
don't
know each other) on the same machine? If it is, any recommended solutions? Many
virtual machines and each one has one asterisk installation? One linux box that
has several asterisk installations? What would be the hardware requirements for
running such a setup?

Regards,
Akef

Sigh... read the wiki. Search the lists. This has been answered at least 
fifteen times.

You don't need multiple instances of *, just set up your dialplan properly.

Hint: Contexts are the key.

This interests me as I find I have several customers who cannot afford a
complete hosting computer but need some extensions online. Domains are of no
importance, I would think you cold give them each a block of extensions,
i.e., 1xx, 2xx, they would know there were other companies on the machine
but why would they care?
What would be the issues? IVRs? I think voicemail has context for multi
company hosting.

Chris Mason
www.anguillaguide.com
Tel:  (305) 704-7249 Fax: (815)301-9759

On Sun, 2005-05-22 at 21:45 +0000, aakef@os-sp.com
wrote:
> Did anyone try to have more than one asterisk installation on one machine?
The bigger question is why ignore 'contexts' to run multiple instances?
Contexts give you out of the box ability to route certain calls to
certain places for independant IVR systems, independant voicemail,
independant channel grouping, etc.

You can vhost asterisk in this way quite easily without the extra
overhead of extra instances.  The only thing you have to be careful of
is naming collisions (hint prefix or postfix names with some company
identifier eg  [Cust1-incoming]).  Gotta be careful when doing this so
that all 'goto' and similar are rewritten as well if the customer has
the ability to create raw entries (if done via a tool, web or otherwise
the tool could make sure this doesnt happen).


-- 
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