SageTV server from a HyperV VM?

[lash]

I am looking into SageTV. I added a Happauge PVR500 to my current home server and it simply doesn't work. The machine is a Windows 2008 R2 x64 system. The drivers worked fine but SageTV doesn't see them. I'll start a new thread for that.

However, till I can get that working, I was wondering if it was feasible to run SageTV, the server part, from a Windows XP or Linux VM via HyperV?

Anyone try this? With virtual box or VMware or anything similar? Any possible problems I may run into?

Thanks!

[stanger89]

Sage itself should run fine in a VM. The problem will be getting any of the capture devices to work. You'll be limited to USB or network devcies.

[lash]

Ah, you think the PVR500 will not be emulated or work on the VM? That makes sense. Any ideas on how to circumvent this or get it working?

Thank you!

[stanger89]

AFAIK, no virtualization supports PCI/PCIe/AGP devices, only USB and network.

[valnar]

Or network enable your USB! Let's get really abstract.

I have one at work for a USB dongle that is needed on a VM Server, but I don't know how it would work for a capture device.

[lash]

Now that is interesting! Unfortunately, I have no USB capture devices. Guess doing it in a VM is not the way to work around this problem. Thanks for the help!

[stevech]

Originally Posted by lash

Now that is interesting! Unfortunately, I have no USB capture devices. Guess doing it in a VM is not the way to work around this problem. Thanks for the help!

All the USB over ethernet products I've seen support only USB 1's 12Mbps speed. The one referenced above is no exception..

"USB 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 (USB 2.0 devices operate at 12 Mbps)"

no doubt, a physics-based limitation of the cat5 baulin transformers used.

[WhiteWhisker]

A few of us have some of this stuff working on server 2008 R2 with hd-pvrs. I have sagetv service running on my main server 2008 r2 installation and I put WHS and some other stuff in hyper-v images, did you do all of the stuff required to make tuners work in server os (desktop support, bda, etc?). Check this thread for more info:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43828

[hufnagel]

what about those that want to just "port" their current physical machine to a virtual one. I've had great success doing that for various winxp and win2k3 installs here and since I'm pretty much going to abandon the PVR-250 boards and go with 4 channels of HDHR for input I'm thinking I could VM the OS partition (which is running WinXP SP2) and hook up the main 750GB storage drive as a dedicated drive for just that VM. I'm not too concerned about HD-PVR hookups at this time and if I need access to the PVR-250 boards at some point in the future (which I'm pretty sure I will for VHS transfers) I can always drop them into a highly energy efficient machine, run a copy of winxp on it and make it into a network encoder via the Sage Recorder application and feed that into the main SageTV VM.

just wondering if anyone's tried this idea before I give it a test-whirl at some point in the coming days.

[DigitalMan]

I have mine set up in ESXi running a windows 7 guest and HDhomerun tuners and its been running flawlessly.

Vmware does support PCI passthrough but I haven't tried it with a capture card.

[Fuzzy]

what benefit are you hoping to achieve by virtualizing? It seems today there is a tendency to virtualize just for the sake of doing it. buzzwords are bad, mkay?

[trini0]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

what benefit are you hoping to achieve by virtualizing? It seems today there is a tendency to virtualize just for the sake of doing it. buzzwords are bad, mkay?

From less cabling to less electricity, and everything else in between..

[stanger89]

Vs what?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

what benefit are you hoping to achieve by virtualizing? It seems today there is a tendency to virtualize just for the sake of doing it. buzzwords are bad, mkay?

It's a better choice than trying to run a bunch of apps along with Sage on the Sage server. If you have a lot of memory and powerful multiple processors\multiple cores and a multi-port NIC then instead of wasting the resources you could setup one VM as your Sage server. Since Sage is not very CPU intensive the VM could get by with minimum resources. Then for those that feel that need to run their web server, email system, ftp server, etc those can be done on one or more VMs and never bother with what the Sage server is doing. Throw on a high-end desktop VM running Win 7 and you have all of your systems running on one box and none of them interfering with the others. We usually have between 20-40 servers of various flavors running on one host. The other plus is the hardware is presented to the VM as generic scsi, network, etc cards and we see less hardware issues on VMs. (Be it ESX or MS) If you can get the VM to work with your tuners it's not a bad way to go.

Gerry

[Fuzzy]

I have yet to find any apps that 'interfere' with the sage server, which is why i was asking about it. I've been using my sage server also as a client, webserver, fileserver, showanalyzer, print server, and the occasional gaming system (when I want big-screen, stereoscopic gaming), and I've never had a non-hardware related stability issue. The only advantage I can see to virtualization would be if you had multiple web servers that you wanted to all be independent, and all use port 80, virtualization would allow you to use a different host for each. If you are virtualizing to save resources... you're doing it wrong.

[DigitalMan]

Mine is running on a PowerEdge T710, it's really an awesome well thought-out box. It replaced a bunch of other servers that are now all virtualized. The performance is absolutely phenomenal. The biggest issue for me was manageability but the performance of these new Xeon 5500's was a real bonus.

If you think the only advantage of virtualization is running independent web servers, clearly you're doing it wrong.

[Fuzzy]

Please keep in mind we are talking about residential media servers here. Keeping the discussion in context, I still fail to see how virtualization will help a sage server.

[src666]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Please keep in mind we are talking about residential media servers here. Keeping the discussion in context, I still fail to see how virtualization will help a sage server.

It's not about helping the Sage Server, it's about helping the person who has to set up and run everything.

I'm a "residential" user, and I've peaked at about 5 server boxes. Anything I can consolidate will mean less equipment expense, less power used, easier maintenance, etc.

In case it escaped your notice, most of the people here are enthusiasts. Yes, not everyone is a propeller head, but there are plenty around. If running a virtualized system isn't what you want to do, fine. The rest of us need to solve our problems.

[Fuzzy]

I certainly understand how a residential user could require a lot of server, for media, photos, web pages, gaming, whatever.. but what do you actually gain from virtualizing that couldn't be done in the host OS? For me, the only time I've ever felt the need to virtualize is for development.. testing on different OS's...

I wasn't trying to take the thread off course, i was more replying to someone mentioning something about virtualizing because sage uses fewer resources.. I dind't see how that made sense.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by src666

I'm a "residential" user, and I've peaked at about 5 server boxes. Anything I can consolidate will mean less equipment expense, less power used, easier maintenance, etc.

The question is what does consolidating with VM's provide/offer that simply consolidating into a single machine doesn't?

Ie what's better about running multiple VMs vs running just multiple apps? For example I've got Sage, IIS (for cacti), J River Media Center running on my "server", but I just run them as apps. What would running them in VM's gain me?