Brainstorming about consolidating servers

[m1abrams]

So I was thinking about how to reduce the number of physical machines I run 24/7 in the house. I was thinking with quad core machines and memory so cheap one could build a rather nicely equipped machine for not too much money. Then use this machine to do XEN visualization to run multiple servers and OSes.

Now I have done XEN for a development environment and find it to be rather fast particularly if you do NOT use a loop back device for the filesystem but instead dedicate a partition or device to the guest. These systems have been paravirtual which is more efficient than full virtual.

My question is could one run SageTV server as a XEN guest? If you ran SageTV on linux you could do a paravirtual however Windows I am not sure you can do that paravirtual so you would have to do Full. You can easily put multiple NICs in the machine so you can dedicate a NIC just for the SageTV. The only obstacles I can see are Disk I/O performance and the Big one accessing the different tuner hardware.

Just remember in full virt you can not block off PCI devices to the guest so any PCI tuners would be a no go. Some USB devices could work, however probably not any tuners. HDHomerun though should work fine.

[mikesm]

I have thought about that too, but I think the tuner issues will probably hose you, unless everything is network based like the hdhomerun, or the tuners can be hosted on a windows machine (like the R5000).

In the end, I run Sage on a dedicated windows server, and the NAS on a separate system that also runs vmware on it, and can host a windows server environment for running commercial skip, transcoding, etc...

2 Servers is not all that bad after all. :-)

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by mikesm

I have thought about that too, but I think the tuner issues will probably hose you, unless everything is network based like the hdhomerun, or the tuners can be hosted on a windows machine (like the R5000).

In the end, I run Sage on a dedicated windows server, and the NAS on a separate system that also runs vmware on it, and can host a windows server environment for running commercial skip, transcoding, etc...

2 Servers is not all that bad after all. :-)

Yep the more I think about it the tuner issue will probably cause me too many headaches. Some have done it with MythTV. What I could do though is have 2 machines like you said. 1 that is the XEN box that can run, Firewall, Asterisk, fileserver, NX server, Squeezecenter. Then a separate machine for SageTV. Also could have the XEN guest do comskip like you said. The XEN machine would probably be a pretty beefy machine, and the Sage machine could be a little lighter with just tuners attached disk storage for recording, movies can reside on the fileserver. However, I am not sure the fileserver will have the performance to handle 4-6 recordings and multiple playback so the recording drives may have to be local.

[perfessor101]

I have a machine sitting here ready for an install and I too was considering loading Xen on it ... but I'm fairly new to both Linux and Xen (Okay ... I've played with various nix's over the years and can basically follow a howto) (and I've been trying to figure out which nix would have the most current xen and simplicity for Sage setup ...). The last time I tried a Xen Server iso on my machine I found they didn't have the driver for an Atheros Gigabit onboard nic on the disk. (attlantastic, attastic?)

I have a Phenom 9500 with an AMD 770 chipset motherboard (Asus m3a) and 2GB memory. I also have several PCI tuner cards and a USB one to play with (3 x Ati eHome wonder, Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600, Hauppauge WinTV PVR-USB2, 1 x UltraTV 1500 MCE). Eventually I would like to move my 2 x Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE's into the new computer / install from my SageTV server running XP. (Currently I have SageTV Server for Windows ... I have considered getting SageTV for linux, but wanted to know it would work on my hardware without too much trouble first)

With current Intel (quad-core) and AMD chips (phenom) you have hardware (i/o) / OS virtualization support on the processor. So you can use pci passthru with Xen on these processors even with a Xen Unaware OS (windows XP). Leaving a possibility for someone to run a Windows XP based SageTV server within Xen if pci passthru will work with TV capture cards.

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VTdHowTo

rambling on, confusing the issues,
Bobby

[matt91]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

So I was thinking about how to reduce the number of physical machines I run 24/7 in the house.

So this is only tangentially addressing your question, but if saving money is the intent of reducing the machines running 24/7, you might have a *long* return on investment if you have to buy anything new. But I'm sure you've already thought of this.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by matt91

So this is only tangentially addressing your question, but if saving money is the intent of reducing the machines running 24/7, you might have a *long* return on investment if you have to buy anything new. But I'm sure you've already thought of this.

Well I yet to wire my house so that I can even use a Server / Client setup for sagetv. However I have the plans in place to wire the house, but have a long honey-do list to complete before I am allowed to do that project .

However once I finish the wiring project I will need to get some new machines to run as servers. I have some old hardware I can throw together, however I have found that some of my older motherboards are less than stable (blown caps). So buying new gear is kinda of needed, buying fewer machines and running XEN would make it cheaper even if I build up the XEN machine a bit.

However money is not the only reason to do this, other is because I want to. Also if I have fewer physical machines I have less hardware to maintain. Course when that hardware fails I do lose a good bit of services until it is fixed.

But please understand that this post is more of a thinking ideas out loud post. It will be awhile before I get this far in my list of projects. Hoping to be able to get the house wired before the end of the year!

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

Yep the more I think about it the tuner issue will probably cause me too many headaches. Some have done it with MythTV. What I could do though is have 2 machines like you said. 1 that is the XEN box that can run, Firewall, Asterisk, fileserver, NX server, Squeezecenter. Then a separate machine for SageTV. Also could have the XEN guest do comskip like you said. The XEN machine would probably be a pretty beefy machine, and the Sage machine could be a little lighter with just tuners attached disk storage for recording, movies can reside on the fileserver. However, I am not sure the fileserver will have the performance to handle 4-6 recordings and multiple playback so the recording drives may have to be local.

Interesting, we run similar apps. Personally, I would never combine firewall functionality with my primary storage server. I never want a server at home touching the public internet directly. And I run asterisk as well, but on another server still. that server has an extended run UPS on it, and the phones in the house are all POE powered. So I keep that on separate VLAN and hardly ever update it. So for me, I have 4 servers. Everytime I think about consolidating Sage, pfsense (which is freebsd based), and Trixbox, I run into some issue, either security, power, drivers, etc... that keep everything separate.

[motobarsteward]

I consolidated my system last week (see my signature). It's pretty nerve-racking but I'm saving quite a lot of power and I now back up to a 2TB NAS that I bought from E-Bay for £250. The server is still slow by todays standards but I tink it's twice the speed of what came before!

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by motobarsteward

I consolidated my system last week (see my signature). It's pretty nerve-racking but I'm saving quite a lot of power and I now back up to a 2TB NAS that I bought from E-Bay for £250. The server is still slow by todays standards but I tink it's twice the speed of what came before!

Did you use XEN? Or did you just put all your services on one windows machine?

[flavius]

When I replaced my Sage server last summer I was left with yet another door stopper, so, since I hadn't toyed around with FreeBSD in a long time I took a couple left-over ATA drives and voila, there was my second server, hosting ripped DVD's. It's been almost a year now.

Not that I really need that box, though.

[Slipshod]

I'm in the process of doing this with VMWare server on WHS. I'm running Sage on host OS, and will be running several ubuntu guests as VMs for Email, LAMP, and the wifi NMS app from work.

It's free, and works really well. You can do the dedicated drive trick for performance if you like, and I think you can also dedicate NICs as well.

In theory you might be able to run Sage in a VM using an HD-PVR, R5000, or some other USB tuner. I don't think I'd try it personally, but it might work.

Cheers,
Slipshod