New Server - SageTV+unRAID under ESXi 4.1

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by ChaOConnor

So here is my current status.

• eSATA External Encloser - I have a Rosewill RSV-S4-X with 4 x 2TB Western Digital EARS Green Drives in them.
• Parity - I am using an SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM (their Green Drive) as the Parity Drive for the Rosewill Box.
• Cache - I have a Western Digital 1TB Black drive as my cache drive for unraid.

unRaid works.

I would pull that Samsung drive before it causes grief if I were you. That drive has a firmware bug that causes bad blocks to be written when hdparm is called on them. And another that causes incomplete "writes" of blocks in their internal queue. There are apparently firmware fixes for both issues, but with that kind of history I would give them a wide berth. Even if you do trust the firmware fixes, they have still proven to perform poorly with unRAID.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9339
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=8012
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/inde...bility#Samsung

The consensus in the unRAID community is to steer clear of these drives at least until limetech releases a version of unRAID that is compatible with AF drives.

[ChaOConnor]

Spectrum, yes I saw those. I've upgraded the firmware, and with the 4.7 beta, I should be good to go. Thank you for pointing it out though!

[ChaOConnor]

As you can see from my signature, I am currently running a AMD Anthlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz. Does anyone have any ideas on how it will work in the ESXi environment w/ 3 VMs running? (unRaid, Win7 & WHS)

Reason I ask, I have some extra Amazon gift certificates lying around and could upgrade the processor to a Quad core, and I'd rather do it now while I have the box open and am re-arranging drives.

Any ideas? If the Anthlon won't cut it, any suggestions for an AMD processor to support?

Also, should I beef up the RAM?

Thanks!!!

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by ChaOConnor

Spectrum, yes I saw those. I've upgraded the firmware, and with the 4.7 beta, I should be good to go. Thank you for pointing it out though!

I hadn't seen the 4.7 beta when I posted. As long as you trust the firmware fixes, you should be set with the 4.7 release.

[ChaOConnor]

Originally Posted by stanger89

So, first things first, the hardware that's going into this thing:

The PC hardware is actually my old HTPC hardware:
AMD Athlon BE-2400 (45W TDP).
4GB memory
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
Intel PWLA8391GTBLK PRO/1000 GT Desktop Network Adapter (the onboard GigE isn't recognized by ESXi)

For SageTV I'll be tossing in my two 1TB Caviar Blacks

For unRAID I'll be starting with 3 WD20EARS drives in an iStarUSA BPU-350 hot swap 5-in-3 cage.

I've got unRAID actually running in a VM right now. I sort of cheated, instead of using a USB key for unRAID I created a virtual disk for it. I'm using the free unRAID right now since I've only got 3 disks. I suspect I'll have to tackle either getting setting up passthrough with a USB Key or getting the registration stuff setup when I need to add a drive.

The Drives are direct passthrough, not virtual discs. Reading about ESXi this doesn't do much good for performance, but I like it because I can actually run the same discs in either a "real" or "virtual" unRAID. I created the virtual discs at the ESXi command line (SSH can be enabled in the security options now in the gui). I used the following command:

vmkfstools -a lsilogic -z /vmfs/devices/disks/<real disk> <virtual disk>

Then you just add the virtual disks to the unRAID VM, and then boot unRAID and configure it like normal.

My unRAID VM is actually doing a parity sync right now, performance seems quite good, it's doing about 58MB/sec on the sync.

Stanger, sorry to resurrect an old post, but I was confused about something you said. You said you were using direct pass through on the disks, which is what I think I want to be doing, but then you mention you made virtual disks. Was this just for the USB? Ideally I'd like to get rid of the USB dongle hanging out of my PC... I swear it's going to break at some point.

I have unRaid working perfectly... now I just need to virtualize it in ESXi. Appreciate any insight you could provide, thank you!

[stanger89]

What I did when I was playing was to make a standard virtual disk, and copy the unRAID files to it. This works fine for the free version, but the paid versions are tied to the GUID of the flash drives so you'd either have to "fake out" the GUID in the virtual disc config (if it's possible) or buy a new license with whatever the GUID if the virtual drive is. It seems like there was some discussion on the unRAID forums about how to get licensed unRAID running off a virtual disk, or just stick with USB passthrough.

I did use RDM for the data disks though. I never did get temperature or spindown working in ESXi though.

[ChaOConnor]

All,

So I too have hit a snag with the virtualization of unRaid. I can't get ESXi to recognize my Sil3132 eSATA controller, which is which is what my 4-Bay drive array is running off of, and what unRaid is on. So, until I get that going, I can't virtualize everything yet.

There are custom OEM.tgz's out there that add addtional capability for cards like the Sil3132, and I created a new ESXi install, incorporating that OEM.tgz, but still no go. I'll have to trouble shoot more when I get back home, but I'm traveling for work and had to leave it.

If anyone has any experience on implementing none standard hardware into ESXi, I'd love to hear it.

Once I get the Sil3132 recognized, unRaid should work fine, I'll have to hack my way through things like drive spin down, temperatures, etc. I think I have a solution for the drive spin down, may have to forget temperatures for now, which is okay.

More to follow!

[aflat]

I know, old topic, but new info. Has anyone tried ESXi 5 yet? They have a cool hardware passthrough mode, so that you can pass through hardware into the virtualized OS, without going through the virtualization layer. This means we can get firewire into our VM's now. I haven't tried it yet myself, I don't have ESX on my server only because I have firewire tuning. But I may have to start playing.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by aflat

I know, old topic, but new info. Has anyone tried ESXi 5 yet? They have a cool hardware passthrough mode, so that you can pass through hardware into the virtualized OS, without going through the virtualization layer. This means we can get firewire into our VM's now. I haven't tried it yet myself, I don't have ESX on my server only because I have firewire tuning. But I may have to start playing.

Unless you're talking about some new type of hardware pass-through, they have had this technology in ESX 4.0 and 4.1 (maybe even 3.5 too). As long as your motherboard supported VT-H, you could pass-through, USB, SATA, Firewire cards etc.. to a guest. Some people were even doing this here with ESX 4.x to get their HDPVR's working with SageTV VMs.

[Fuzzy]

And I don't think hardware support was even required for USB passthrough, just for PCIe passthrough. The difference was that USB passthrough had some overhead, and caused problems for high bandwidth usage like the HD-PVR, making those WITH the hardware support more successful, as they would simply pass through an entire USB controller to the guest OS.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

And I don't think hardware support was even required for USB passthrough, just for PCIe passthrough. The difference was that USB passthrough had some overhead, and caused problems for high bandwidth usage like the HD-PVR, making those WITH the hardware support more successful, as they would simply pass through an entire USB controller to the guest OS.

Correct, I wasn't counting the USB passthrough they added in 4.1. I should have mentioned that too.

[heffe2001]

I checked out 5.0, and the what's new list doesn't have anything new that I think would affect running Sage under a VM. They've upped the version of the virtual machine, but there doesn't appear to be anything new on the hardware virtualization front.


If you want to see what's been added/changed, you can check out this writeup here: http://www.virtualizetips.com/2011/0...sphere-esxi-5/

[elefante]

Now supports native EFI BIOS and USB 3.0 and isochronous, and 3D enhancements. The one VT-d passthrough that is not working properly yet is GPU passthrough, so you still cant reliably (some ATI cards can work) do a full Sage offload to a client. Also the scheduler has been improved for Intel HT CPUs, but normal user wont notice.

FWIW I would wait a few months before upgrading and they work out the bugs. Major ESX releases suffer for 3 months while all the drivers, bugs, etc get worked out. I'm still running 4.1u1, and there is nothing compelling to move to 5 yet for the average user.

HTH

[Jesse]

So is there any real possibility of running sage in a VM using an HDPVR, colossus (pci-e), hdhomerun and a 3ware raid card? I am guessing the raid card, hdhomerun and the hdpvr should work. But what about the colossus?

Thoughts?

Jesse

[Fuzzy]

If you've got a board that fully supports the VT-d hardware virtualization, it should work fine. There isn't much of a performance hit with the virtualization anyway.

Somthing to think about is WHY do you want to run it virtualized. Think about the reasons for doing it before doing it just because you can.

[Jesse]

Thanks Fuzzy. I wanted to confirm that it was possible before dedicating a bunch of processor cycles to planning it.

I do have an Asus Q45 based board that will fully support VT-d.

As for the why, I would like to combine WHS 2011 and sage into a single server. My first effort at running sage on a WHS 2011 box went quite poorly, so I now have two separate servers running. In order to consolidate I am considering trying again to install sage on my WHS 2011 box or virtualizing them both on a single server.

I have no experience with virtualization, so it might be a fun learning experience to try it. It may also be a bout of self inflicted brain damage.

Jesse

[Fuzzy]

What are you gaining from WHS though? You'd spend a lot less time setting up a separate different backup system on your win7 sage server, than you would setting up the virtualization, and performance would be quite a bit better.

[elefante]

I run Colossus in a VM. Works perfectly (in W7MC) that is. My VM uses 2vCPU and 2GB of RAM, and that was with HDHR and Colossus. I have over 20VM's running in my setup (for many things), but one of the real benefits to visualization is the separation of duties. So it makes perfect sense to have just a sage VM. The one thing to be careful about w/ VMs is to assign the resources properly otherwise you will waste resources. The only reason I use 2 vCPU is for comskip, and keep RAM as low as humanly possible. 2 GB w/ Win7 and just running sage works just fine.

I put it up to 3 GB when I was testing the Colossus memory leak, but once I pulled the Colossus out of the setup I went back to 2 GB.

Performance of newer ESX is within a few percent of bare metal, so performance wise if things are setup correctly you can have a very good experience.

I just got a PCIe 1x ATI graphics card that I am going to try to get running in a VM w/ Colossus so I can have a native setup (no extender). Will let you know how that goes.

[zoltran]

I'm considering doing the ESXI/UnRaid consolidation .. mostly to get the benefits of Unraid.
I'm only using hd-pvr's so I should be OK.

For those of you that have done this.. how are you protecting or backing up the ESX Datastore drives? I'd like to use Raid, but ESX doesn't support Intel ICH9 chipset and I don't have funds for one of the 'supported' RAID cards.

I plan to run ESC from a USB key.. which is easy to duplicate/backup.

Can you create a Datastore for the Sage VM etc on the uraid stoarge?

Or are you using some other backup solution.

[joenobody33]

I recently made the change to SageTV7 and decided to move my server to a virtual machine. I have a pretty beefy rig (ESX 4.1, dual Intel E5645's 96GB RAM, RAID10) I use to run an entire virtualized Citrix environment for work.

So I've been running it for over a month now and noticed it has been a bit lagging when changing menus and when viewing images in a sideshow, the scrolling of images would cause stuttering. It was still very usable and I dismissed it as SageTV7 running slow on my HD200s. I recently just built a SagetV7 server on a physical box for a family member and realized my virtualized instance was way slower!

After troubleshooting the issue, I found only one fix that improved performance. When I set the affinity on the SageTV process to only utilize 1 CPU core, the stuttering and lag decreased a ton.

While this improves performance a lot, the physical instance is still way faster. Has anyone else experienced this issue?