Virtual Machine for SageTv?

[heffneil]

I am thinking about moving my SageTV installation to a virtual machine. Is there anyone here using a virtual instance and if so what tuning hardware are you using?

I am running a couple HD-PVR's and a USB-Uirt so I am concerned about using the USB devices via the virtual machine and how well it works. I have had lots of issues where the only way to get the server to become responsive again is to reboot it. And rebooting involved powering the machine off physically with the switch vs a restart. This isn't very inconvenient and not very practical for my configuration....

I was thinking I could use a share drive to write my recordings to my host machine... and all my videos are moved to my unraid server.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!

Neil

[Spectrum]

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this in the past month or so
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sear...archid=5243362

[heffneil]

Yes I noticed after the face in the hardware forum there was a lot of talk. Looks like a very bad proposition

Neil

[jptheripper]

This is just my opinion, but virtualizing something that is so dependent on hardware/software interaction is a really really bad idea. It just doesnt work reliably.

That and the i/o hit you take (we have measured upwards of 35% with VMWare at work) almost never justifies it. VM really succeeds when you have applications that either need to be isolated or take minimal resources so you can pile multiple instances on a box. Or when you are making changes so often that snapshotting because essential.

just my two cents.

[farscapesg1]

I think a lot of it depends on the hardware you are planning on using with the VM. I'm currently testing virtualizing WHS with SageTV installed and it seems to be working fine for me. The difference is that I'm using a HDHomerun for QAM tuning, and passing an older NVidia DualTV PCI card directly to the VM. I haven't had any issues recording on all 4 tuners so far.

I have heard of some issues using USB-based tuners like the HD-PVR, but I can't really comment on them since I don't own one.

[elefante]

I have been running my Sage 6 inside of a VM for over a year (ESX 3.5, ESX 4, ESX 4.1)r, and I have absolutely 0 problems, however I use ESXi, not server and that makes all the difference.

I use iSCSI (another box) as storage (virtual too), and I have 10 VM's running on the same box that runs SageTV in a Windows 7 VM, and it NEVER stutters or has issues.

I config the VM to have 2vCPU and 2 GB or RAM, VMXNET3. The base hardware is (boots off of usb stick < 1GB), Older athlon 940 Quad (power policy enabled), Gigabyte MB, two intel PCIe GIGe cards, and 8 GB of RAM.

My tuner is a HDHR, however I have been testing a USB HDPVR for the last few weeks and it works fine. You have to run esxi 4.1 though, because it can pass USB from the hardware into the VM, earlier versions were not supported.

You can control the VM's with the vCenter Client. This is all FREE to the average user. If you plan on running server, you are not going to be happy because this runs through as OS and will not perform as you wish.

I even have virtualized my ISCSI server, now this is commercial ESX, however you can run ESXi for free with local storage.

Once you go VM, you will never go back.

Keep in mind that hardware PCI cards (Ceton, etc) won't work w/ ESX, nor firewire so if you plan on using either of those, then ESX is not for you.

[heffneil]

I have one haupauge tuner that is PCI so I guess that ruins it for me

I need to build a nice server for sage and run everything else on the current server! I just don't want to run so many machine in my home!

[farscapesg1]

Originally Posted by elefante

IKeep in mind that hardware PCI cards (Ceton, etc) won't work w/ ESX, nor firewire so if you plan on using either of those, then ESX is not for you.

This isn't entirely true. It depends on the hardware, but I'm passing my NVidia DualTV (PCI dual tuner card) through to a VM and have not had any issues with recording so far. The key is that the motherboard and CPU have to support VT-d (Intel) or IOMMU (AMD). As far as I know, Firewire is out though.

I made sure when I started building my new server that the components all supported these features (Xeon e5640 processor, Supermicro X8ST3-F motherboard).

Also remember that with ESXi 4.1 you can only pass 4 devices to a VM. I'm testing Sage in a virtualized WHS system at the moment, but I'm thinking I may break it out into a WinXP or Win7 VM since I'm also passing the SAS controller to the WHS VM (using up one of the "4 devices" limit). It would also let me backup the SageVM. Of course the main reason is because I can't get the WHS VM to recognize more than 2 vCPUs (even though device manager shows 4, Task Manager only shows 2 and the performance is equal to a 2 processor VM).

[elefante]

DirectpathIO is not yet supported for generic PCI/e cards, and the requirement for virt I/O also depends upon the MB BIOS and the chipset (800+ chipset for AMD for example). Also no bridge chips should be in the path (that is not normally an issue w/ desktop MB's. It may work, but this is an evolving feature. In a few years most procs will have this, and this won't be an issue but right now this is definitely bleeding edge. If you consider your sage production, I wouldn't recommend it.

I'm happy to see some folks have it working in the wild, unfortunately my older 700 chipset precludes me from tinkering until I refresh my hardware next year once the bulldozer procs come out.

You can try it though, if you have the right hardware... Here's more info:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11089

The other alternative is to run hyper-V with WIN2K8 (sage-parent partition), and the VM's whatever else you want to run outside of that. In that case the parent partition will have good performance for your hardware (it's running native). U need a server license tho, and that can be expensive unless u are a corporate guy with access. However sage isn't supported in W2K8, and it really isn't recommended to run apps in the parent partition.

TBH, you don't really need that much processing power unless you are doing comskip or transcoding. Almost any cheapo dual core will do the job for your sage server.

As you say, build a dedicated PC for sage, and run everything else on ESXi. If you build it energy efficient, you can probably do it for 50-70 Watts (+PCI power). Even my older Phenoms use 85 Watts idling, and those are quads.