Shoretel on a Virtual Machine?

[paiutetribe]

I've been told that there is some hardware-specific buffering that goes on with the Shoretel system. I would like to know if it is possible to configure a Shoretel system to run properly on a virtual machine.

Has anyone done this or at least tried it?

[JasonC]

I can get the Call Manager to run on a virtual machine without any problems, but I wouldn't put the Director on a virtual machine.

[huffditty]

Yup, we are doing it. As a safeguard we are installing a dedicated hardware NIC on the VM. So it is not a bridged environment.

[Palitto Consulting]

I run my testing server under VirtualBox under Linux. It is tolerable, but occasionally when calling a system extension there are skips in the audio. I have found that I have to use the "low latency" Linux kernel to remove these. This means that my host system takes too long to reschedule a time slice for the VM.

I don't know how well this works with Windows as the host, if you were planning on that. If you do have problems, you might try 1. Increase the VM process's priority. 2. Perhaps the dedicated netwoek card would help also.

[paiutetribe]

Thanks for the replies.

I would like to try running director on an HP DL-380 physical host running S2008 Std x64. VM OS would be S2003 Std x32. I have some software that will image a hard drive, which I can restore as a virtual image. I would like to use VMWare as the VM host software.

I'd like to move the phone system to a VM for contingency of operations, but only if the bugs would be minimal.

[ShoreTel_Dave]

We have had bad experiences on virtual machines, regardless of the dedicated NIC.
I am not an expert on virtualisation but I think time works differently in a virtual environment.
ShoreTel is a realtime application and presumably CPU ticks coming at irregular intervals because of the way multiple virtual machines get scheduled messes with the timing somehow.
As I understand it, this is a limitation of current virtualisation platforms and not a problem with ShoreTel specifically. It would degrade performance of any realtime application from other vendors as well.

[paiutetribe]

Thanks shoretel_dave and huffditty. Huffditty, how is your VM experience going? Do you have more details about it?

[tdlapointe]

Yup, we are doing it. As a safeguard we are installing a dedicated hardware NIC on the VM. So it is not a bridged environment.

HuffDitty, may I ask how you are doing it? My client has their Terminal Servers running virtual and NONE of the PCM's work, is there a trick beyond the dedicated NIC?

[Palitto Consulting]

Running in a VM should have no effect whatsoever on the connectivity of call manager. I would guess you have a firewall blocking the traffic, or a routing problem preventing the traffic from reaching the server.

[Jason Learmouth]

HuffDitty, may I ask how you are doing it? My client has their Terminal Servers running virtual and NONE of the PCM's work, is there a trick beyond the dedicated NIC?

Did you install the third party TAPI driver on the TS as per the install guide?