3CX Installation on vCloud Air

  



Welcome back for part two of 3CX in the cloud series. In part one I covered how 3CX functioned on Microsoft Azure. Today I will write about my experience installing the system on vCloud Air by vmWare. Again as a Hosted Voice company we were testing out 3CX on vCloud Air for our own selfishness. We wanted to see if we could host the 3CX Virtual PBX in the cloud so we could be up and running immediately and have little to no cost for our startup Hosted IP PBX system. If you read part one on Azure you saw that as of this writing 3CX Virtual PBX did not function correctly or as expected. The standalone version worked fine and I would recommend it on Azure.


vCloud Air is similar to Azure and Amazon AWS, another cloud product where you can pay by the hour for your server. One thing that made me leary to start was the rumors that vmWare may not be developing vCloud Air anymore, scary! I wanted to have a robust platform to for our Hosted Voice using VOIP. To think I would put my eggs in that basket and then later find out that it wouldn’t be supported could be problematic, but we pressed on, as a vmWare Partner they (vmWare) assured me that wasn’t the case.


When we spun up our first VM on vCloud Air it was actually simpler to me than Azure. Don’t get me wrong I like Azure, but I am a die hard vmWare guy. My bread and butter is installing VCE systems for a living. vmWare was the first and is still the best in virtualization, yes I drank the koolaid and I love it. Back to 3CX, after making the standalone version of 3CX work on Azure it wasn’t even a concern that it would be an issue on vCloud Air. Since we were starting up a Hosted Voice system for businesses and school systems in our area around Wichita Falls and Dallas Fort Worth we only tested the 3CX Virtual PBX.

Installation was super easy, setting up the network on vCloud Air was super easy. I like that we could get another public IP and provision it in a few minutes, then NATing that IP and having control over our own firewall instance. It is a simple interface, the NAT interface was easy and intuitive. Azure doesn’t have any control like that and their network panel and opening ports up on Azure sucked! Azure works great in the VPN space, but I wouldn’t use it without your own gateway, not for any Hosted Voice or hosted anything for public consumption. I have an extra domain controller up there, ADFS, things that I have to have that are Windows based and connected via VPN. Maybe I should write an article just about Azure?? Later.


3CX Virtual PBX works on vCloud Air, sort of. The mechanics of the 3CX Virtual PBX work, NAT, opening up the specific ports 13060, 13090, 12060, 12090 etc. The problem was the latency you could check here. We tried three different SIP Trunk providers and tested for two weeks with many packet captures. The voice quality just was not good. There was a lag in dialing, a lag a digitized voice in the first 2 seconds. Echo, dropped packets the experience was like using a cell phone in a basement. So in conclusion, again we spent our money on Dell, vmWare and Cisco gear at our datacenter for our 3CX Virtual PBX. Save your time providers unless you are doing a standalone version and the vmWare datacenter is not close by your voice will suffer. However, the voice quality is good on the Azure platform with the 3CX standalone version. As always if you need help with Hosted Voice or anything IT related hit the contact button or give us a call.

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