On Wed, February 8, 2012 11:06, Ed Heron wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 14:01 -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
CentOS-6.2
We have a dedicated CentOS-5.7 host used for fax reception and transmission that we wish to move to a CentOS-6.2 virtual guest instance. The CentOS-6.2 virtual host has a 4-port serial card installed.
Consider replacing your multi-serial port card with a VoIP analog gateway and use a pre-rolled Asterisk with virtual faxmodems, like Elastix. Just make sure your codec is high enough quality. We used to receive faxes using a dedicated Linux box with a Comtrol Rocketport and an USRobotics MP8. We Converted to SIP trunks and managed to get our faxes in the SIP trunks, as well.
This will remove the PCI pass-through from the equation.
After a brief read this seems to me the approach we should take. Recently I have discovered more about irqs, timing delays, and the difficulties/impossiblities of switching hardware from vm instances than I ever wanted to know.
Given that we have three dedicated fax lines and 6 voice is there any hardware that would you suggest for a 4 core x86_64 Intel based host system?
We have looked at going completely to v/f-oip but I do not have the time to deal with those intricacies and get this move completed at the same time. So, for the nonce it appears that we would have to employ an FXO gateway to connect our existing POTS lines to the host.
On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 13:29 -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
On Wed, February 8, 2012 11:06, Ed Heron wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 14:01 -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
CentOS-6.2
We have a dedicated CentOS-5.7 host used for fax reception and transmission that we wish to move to a CentOS-6.2 virtual guest instance. The CentOS-6.2 virtual host has a 4-port serial card installed.
Consider replacing your multi-serial port card with a VoIP analog gateway and use a pre-rolled Asterisk with virtual faxmodems, like Elastix. Just make sure your codec is high enough quality. We used to receive faxes using a dedicated Linux box with a Comtrol Rocketport and an USRobotics MP8. We Converted to SIP trunks and managed to get our faxes in the SIP trunks, as well.
This will remove the PCI pass-through from the equation.
After a brief read this seems to me the approach we should take. Recently I have discovered more about irqs, timing delays, and the difficulties/impossiblities of switching hardware from vm instances than I ever wanted to know.
Given that we have three dedicated fax lines and 6 voice is there any hardware that would you suggest for a 4 core x86_64 Intel based host system?
We have looked at going completely to v/f-oip but I do not have the time to deal with those intricacies and get this move completed at the same time. So, for the nonce it appears that we would have to employ an FXO gateway to connect our existing POTS lines to the host.
It might be OK to virtualize a fax server, but I wouldn't switch to a new voice tech and virtualize it at the same time.
If you are interested in moving to a VoIP phone system, you should get familiar with how it works before adding the virtual component.
Currently, I'm running a couple of locations using Elastix with dedicated hardware. One location supports 6 users with an Intel D845G integrated desktop board with a 1.7 Celeron and 1G RAM, so the hardware requirements are pretty low, but virtualized machines are not necessarily real-time.
I would consider virtualizing it if I dedicated a server CPU and network card, but you'd need to find an external analog VoIP gateway that you are comfortable with. I'm currently using internal Digium cards for T1 and analog connectivity, but obviously I'd want to move to an external gateway or move to pure SIP before virtualizing to avoid having a PCI passthrough issue of my own.
Just make sure that your phone line vendor is not using VoIP internally and handing you an emulated analog interface. I had quite a mess when I tried connecting an analog/VoIP external gateway to some emulated analog lines. The 2 analog emulations didn't quite mesh and I had miscellaneous dropped calls. The issue hurt my department's credibility and led to a longer implementation schedule for our VoIP project.
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Ed Heron -
James B. Byrne