1) I've never used that hardware, or software.
2) I can concieve of many reasons why VMWare could cause packet loss. Bad drivers, naughty applications, etc.. are just the beginning. Alas, I've got no good (specific) advice here.
Keep in mind that voice traffic and processing is stupidly miniscule, when compared to today's hardware.. unless you're dumping like, about, 100 concurrent voice mail sessions at your hardware, I doubt you've got a hardware limitation.
8kbps multiplied by 100 concurrent sessions is still just under 1Mbps, unless my multiplication brain cell is off.
I hate to say it -- but I'd start perfmon'ng on your machine, to see if you can figure out what piece of hardware is getting maxed out. Throw RAM at it first, since RAM is cheap.
There's a big assumption there -- that your packet loss is due to some bottleneck, either from a hardware constraint or some (VMWare?) software constraint.
Look at the basics. CPU, RAM, Disk I/O. (disk lights on more than 30% realtime, disk is suspect..)
Hardware is usually cheaply fixable. Software -- especially from a closed system vendor -- is usually expensive to diagnose and then fix.. if diagnosing it is possible.
SANs can be ugly to diagnose, too. Really ugly. Pile up those Perfmon indicators -- queue length, %time, etc.. Does the SAN actually talk CIFS, NFS, or what? Look at that. NFS can be locky, fer sure.
VMWare tuning is an entire art unto itself. Finding, then hiring, a serious VMWare geek could be beneficial to you. When I purchased a $100k IBM x440 server (8 CPUs) -- IBM gave us a serious VMWare geek for free, for a couple days. IBM Global Services has those geeks -- but ya got to pay for them.
Overall, I'm kinda with Joel_Sisko.
Phones are #1 on the "keep it up and reliable" list of systems. If you have to migrate the VM system to a $5000 piece of hardware that has some half-decent redundancy, it might be worth it. Those cost-reliability decisions are yours to make, yeah?
You might spend $5000 just diagnosing the VMWare installation. Keep a real budget in mind while you approach this one..
Best of luck,
-- Scott.
Main Topics
Browse All Topics
by: Joel_SiskoPosted on 2005-05-22 at 20:36:32ID: 14057681
Comments: Ask yourself how critical is voice to your business? If not important then run as is, bases on the fact you posted a question it has some importance to you. So with this bit of information in hand, if EMC came back to you and said that the Shoreware is causing problems and is not supported would you leave it runningh on your SAN?
Suggestions: Any way you can adjust the VMware that anytime data that needs to be processed for ShoreWare takes priority over all other applications? My gut feeling is saying lack of processing power at the time the voice system needs it the most.
Joel_Sisko