I have played with Unix and Linux some over the years but I have made my living on Mac OS X since the 80s. I would like to accomplish some of the server configurations I am familiar with on Mac OS X with a Linux server.

Primarily I want to have a mirrored boot with at least one virtual machine to run Asterisk (probably with the Elastix version). My reasoning for running it in a VM is so I can experiment with various Asterisk configurations and run additional VMs for other software on the same server hardware. I am planning to use a Quad Xeon with four 500GB SATA drives and 8GB of DDR2 ECC memory.

My main concerns are backing up and performance. Asterisk will be driving around 17 IP phones. I don't think that will be too much to ask of this configuration. We likely will also run LAMP on another VM for a web server.

My thought is to run Ubuntu 7.1 Server as the host OS and the Asterisk guest will be running Centos 5.1.

If anyone thinks there are flaws in my thinking I would love to hear it. I would also like thoughts on backup. We have Tolis BRU server along with Retrospect licenses on the network already.

Thanks in advanced for any thoughts.

I think Xen is the best technology for virtualization you can use because it is very efficient. I have a server dual xeon with 3 gb of ram running 8 virtual machines with very good performance. The installer of Elastix support xen paravirtualizaion you might want to read this thread:

http://www.elastix.org/index.php?opt...6&limitstart=0

Xen is really cool and fast, but it is not that easy to learn. If you want something easy, but not that efficient, you can try Virtual Box.

Regards,

Rafael