Over the past 2 years, I’ve come to love the world of virtualization. Thanks to Intel over blowted hardware, the ever dropping price of memory chips and the available of hard drives that hold more information than an 80’s main frame – virtualization became a must for almost any sane minded Linux users.

Since the time I decided to evaluate virtualization, my main virtualization technologies were: VirtualBox – mostly for running Windows XP on top of my Linux notebook, VMWARE Workstation – for running simple VMWARE appliances on my Linux notebook and VMWARE Server – for running production servers.

Now, these past few weeks I’ve been heavily experminenting with Para-Virtualization, mainly XEN and OpenVZ. Both seem to be similar in concept of operation – but vary with the install and configuration of the software. In any case, my main interest is to see how many Asterisk virtual hosts I’ll be able to run on a single server (Dual XEON Quad Core based), 16GB RAM and a 500GB Raid-1 Array. This is my config, and I’m currently busy building the system.

Once I have proper answers and configurations ready, I’ll publish my findings here. In the mean while, if you’ve done such an experiment, I’d love to hear it.