New Server - SageTV+unRAID under ESXi 4.1

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by 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?

It's most likely IO latency issues affecting your UI experience (this is both disk IO, AND network IO). Both of which WILL get a bit of a performance hit compared to direct hardware, simply due to the hardware abstraction layers involved. With that much memory, you may be able to use something like Supercache, or RAMDisk to eliminate the disk IO limitations - but beyond that, not much I can recommend.

As to why the affinity setting made an improvement, this is likely due to the non-shared cache's on your cores, so when the process would switch from one core to the other, it would be 100% cache misses.

[zoltran]

Hi Folks
I'm hitting a big wall trying to get Sage and my HD-PVRs working nice in a ESXI.
It all 'works' but the HD-PVR recordings stutter and tear.
Any pre-recorded or downloaded movies work great.
I've tried XP, W2003Srv, and Win7. 1.5.7, 1.5.6 and the new 1.6 drivers. All about the same.

I'm pretty sure it's due to poor ESXI USB performance. My MB does not support vt-d, so I'm using the base usb-passthru support.

I've read in the forums that some have had good luck by setting their HDPVR to 720P.

How do you do that?
Update ..
Found the answer. The Video Source/STB ets the resolution.
In this case it's a Starchoice Motorola DSR505. There's a little button under a cover that toggles the component resolutions.
http://forums.canadian-tv.com/showth...-work&p=315428

tia
Wes

[zoltran]

Well .. changing to 720P didn't help the Sage recordings.
They stop, stutter and loose audio sync every few minutes.
I'm recording to a RBA mapped drive that nothing else is using.

It's odd.. because I can view the video just fine with TME..even in a VM.

Looking for any suggestions here folks.
Don't want to put Sage on a separate PC again, but maybe that's what I have to do.

Maybe I try ESX 4.1. I'm on 5.0 now, perhaps that's the factor.

[Fuzzy]

Something like media streaming really needs hardware virtualization. there are just far too many performance penalties with software virtualization, and media streaming is SOOO sensitive, it's just not a good idea.

If you really need to run VM's for other tasks, perhaps you'd be better off running the VM's under a windows host, and run sage on the host OS.

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Something like media streaming really needs hardware virtualization. there are just far too many performance penalties with software virtualization, and media streaming is SOOO sensitive, it's just not a good idea.

If you really need to run VM's for other tasks, perhaps you'd be better off running the VM's under a windows host, and run sage on the host OS.

I agree. You really need vt-d support if you want to virtualize a Sage server with USB or PCI tuners. I run sage as a VM and it took a bit to set up but works fine now.

[zoltran]

Well..
Just did a test of Windows MCE 7 and DVBlink-HDPVR running on my Windows 7 Guest machine. This is the same guest that I'm testing Sage in.

So far .. works great. No drops or stuttering. ..
Even when watching a HD stream from within the ESX guest console !!
Which is quite remarkable.

I'll let MCE record some more tonight and review the recordings in the morning ...

Fuzzy... I don't think it's I/O latency.
I easily get over 5-900Mbs between guests on file copies etc. and both TME and MCE 7 have no trouble with the HDPVR.

To me .. it really now looks like a SageTV issue.. Perhaps some obscure properties setting.

Wes

[zoltran]

The overnight recording from Win7 Windows Media Center via dvblink was flawless.
So it must be something within SageTV.

Anyone have any idea about about where to look? Properties etc?

[DigitalMan]

Originally Posted by 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?

Mine has been running on a Dell T710 for a couple years. I ran it in a VM under ESXi 4.0 which had excellent performance and was snappy. Jumping to ESXi 4.1 I found navigating menus to be a bit sluggish like you describe. Recently I decided to try again jumping to ESXi 4.1 update 2 (I hadn't tried u1) and it seems to be snappy so I plan to stick with 4.1 u2. I haven't tried 5.0 but I don't expect to have any spare time for a while to experiment with it.

[DigitalMan]

Originally Posted by zoltran

Well .. changing to 720P didn't help the Sage recordings.
They stop, stutter and loose audio sync every few minutes.
I'm recording to a RBA mapped drive that nothing else is using.

It's odd.. because I can view the video just fine with TME..even in a VM.

Looking for any suggestions here folks.
Don't want to put Sage on a separate PC again, but maybe that's what I have to do.

Maybe I try ESX 4.1. I'm on 5.0 now, perhaps that's the factor.

I experimented with ESXi USB devices and it has lousy USB virtualization performance in my opinion. If you want to use USB I think you will need to pass through a USB controller.

[zoltran]

We're making progress.

I found a post about interupt clashing with some motherboard based cheip sets.
I moved the two HDPVR's to and old PCI 2 port USB card.
Now things work about 99.5%.

There is sometimes a barely perceptable stutter in playback.
I don't see this when playing back HD movies or other imported video.

I'll keep playing.

Still on ESXI 5.0

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by DigitalMan

I experimented with ESXi USB devices and it has lousy USB virtualization performance in my opinion. If you want to use USB I think you will need to pass through a USB controller.

+1. this is important in my experience.

[joenobody33]

I'm going to give XenServer 6.0 and ESX5 a try soon and see the performance. I'm presently planning to move my SageTV server to a dedicated box if upgrading doesn't help.

Right now I also have a 30TB RAID array running on a VM with PCI pass through and experience some issues with that so moving to physical should fix a few things.