3CX Azure Hosting - any concerns or experiences ?

[Jon Gair]

Are many people using 3CX on Azure and does it have any downsides when comparing it with any of the other cloud options (AWS, Goggle etc) ?

We are starting to use an Azure tenant at the place I work so it makes sense to place it there for a number of reasons. I have ran the PBX express wizard to create an instance although the wizard did not appear to support the UK region where I wanted it hosted so I ended up putting it into US East. It seems to work fine. I may end up building it in Azure using the ISO manually (rather than using the wizard) just to get it into the Azure region I want. Assuming it is still classed as a supportable platform if you do not use the wizard (although I will use one of the VM types listed), currently just a Basic A1 with 1 vcpu/1.75Gb of memory for testing.

My biggest concern is the bandwidth and latency to the Internet although I suspect this is more likely to be a bandwidth issue at the user end (which is fixable by improving local provision and enabling some kind of VoIP prioritization on the edge router) rather than any issues over the Internet and up to the datacenter.

Any advise, experiences or recommended best practices for hosting in Azure would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Jon

 

[seantp]

I don't see why you would have any issues with Azure. Never used it myself, but it's fundamentally no different than any other cloud provider.

 

[CentrexJ]

We moved our on-prem 3CX system to Azure through PBXExpress at the beginning of April. We then setup a site-to-cloud VPN between our office SonicWall Router and Azure which works amazingly well. You can also use SBC and STUN. No issues so far, we are very happy with the choice. With the Azure portal you can easily scale up and down the VM size (cpus / ram / storage) with a short downtime as your needs change or if you find you didn't allocate enough resources. We expect we will be moving more customers that way (some new + some existing customers with on-prem hardware as it gets old and the cloud hosting pricing go down).