asterisk users - Sep 2007 - Multitenant or Multiple virtual machines

Hi all,

We want to offer hosted PBX services to some of our clients (maybe  
10-20) and were wondering if it makes sense to get a software package  
capable of handling multiple virtual tenants or if we should just  
create multiple virtual machines in our server each running a single- 
tenant license of the software.

We have been researching virtual PBX software for asterisk for a  
couple of weeks and the number of solutions that we found that can  
handle multi-tenant needs are limited and even the ones available can  
not do everything some of our clients need. On the other side, there  
is a large quantity of single-tenant packages out there which seem  
more "feature-complete" than the multi-tenant versions we have found.

Since we're not going to be doing any transcoding and using only SIP  
(no IAX or ZAP channels), we started pondering about the virtual  
machine solution (small number of extensions and simultaneous calls;  
we don't expect the number of simultaneous calls to exceed 50). Would  
you guys recommend it? The only thing disadvantage we have thought of  
so far is that when a client happens to call a number that is hosted  
by one of the other clients, the call may end up going up to the SIP  
carrier and back down to us, unless we carefully setup something like  
DUNDi, which we have no experience with and we don't know if these  
single-tenant packages even handle DUNDi setup thru their web  
management interface.

Any opinions/comments/recommendations? Before anyone recommends just  
buying the virtual PBX service from someone else, we _really_ want to  
do this in-house :)

Thanks

lists at infoway.net wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We want to offer hosted PBX services to some of our clients (maybe  
> 10-20) and were wondering if it makes sense to get a software package  
> capable of handling multiple virtual tenants or if we should just  
> create multiple virtual machines in our server each running a single- 
> tenant license of the software.
>
> We have been researching virtual PBX software for asterisk for a  
> couple of weeks and the number of solutions that we found that can  
> handle multi-tenant needs are limited and even the ones available can  
> not do everything some of our clients need. On the other side, there  
> is a large quantity of single-tenant packages out there which seem  
> more "feature-complete" than the multi-tenant versions we have
found.
>
> Since we're not going to be doing any transcoding and using only SIP  
> (no IAX or ZAP channels), we started pondering about the virtual  
> machine solution (small number of extensions and simultaneous calls;  
> we don't expect the number of simultaneous calls to exceed 50). Would  
> you guys recommend it? The only thing disadvantage we have thought of  
> so far is that when a client happens to call a number that is hosted  
> by one of the other clients, the call may end up going up to the SIP  
> carrier and back down to us, unless we carefully setup something like  
> DUNDi, which we have no experience with and we don't know if these  
> single-tenant packages even handle DUNDi setup thru their web  
> management interface.
>
> Any opinions/comments/recommendations? Before anyone recommends just  
> buying the virtual PBX service from someone else, we _really_ want to  
> do this in-house :)
>
> Thanks
>
>
>   
Then try it in-house.  It should not take too long to setup and use SIPP 
to test.  It sounds like you have already made up your mind, so stop 
wasting time and try it.  Then post your results back to the list.

Since you do not list the shortcomings of the products you have looked 
at, I am afraid that making any recommendations is impossible.

Thanks
Steve

Any opinions/comments/recommendations? Before anyone recommends
just
> buying the virtual PBX service from someone else, we _really_ want to
> do this in-house :)  
I am all for using VPS (virtual private servers) instead of the
"classic"
multitenant.

Here are some reasons:

- a VPS provides a Linux environment to each client. This is a big plus for
some clients knowing they are not "boxed"

- Any custom development, new features can be easily applied to individual
clients VPSes without destroying/affecting other clients. Remember, these
clients must have their phone lines up in order to trade :)

- Firmware updates, bug fixes failures etc, will not affect other tenants.

- I can move clients VPS to another server, another data centre across the
world if necessary with a couple commands.

- One can allocate specific resources to each tenant. This is very important
for call centres for example.


All of the above, and a lot more commercial reasons have made me think of
developing administration high availability solution for VPSes which we and
our customers use extensively.


Thanks

Senad
www.bicomsystems.com

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 04:38:40PM +0100, Senad Jordanovic
wrote:
> Any opinions/comments/recommendations? Before anyone recommends just
> > buying the virtual PBX service from someone else, we _really_ want to
> > do this in-house :)  
> 
> I am all for using VPS (virtual private servers) instead of the
"classic"
> multitenant.
> 
> Here are some reasons:
> 
> - a VPS provides a Linux environment to each client. This is a big plus for
> some clients knowing they are not "boxed"
> 
> - Any custom development, new features can be easily applied to individual
> clients VPSes without destroying/affecting other clients. Remember, these
> clients must have their phone lines up in order to trade :)
> 
> - Firmware updates, bug fixes failures etc, will not affect other tenants.
But have to be tested and applied separately to each one => more work.
> 
> - I can move clients VPS to another server, another data centre across the
> world if necessary with a couple commands.
> 
> - One can allocate specific resources to each tenant. This is very
important
> for call centres for example.
Allocating resources means that the global pool, which is normally not
used, can't easily be shared. This can be a pain. Deviding the memory of
a 2GB server between 8 tenants gives you 8 258MB servers.

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