WHS2011 vs Win8/7+VMs?

[KarylFStein]

I recently came across a limitation in WHS2011 that I didn’t know about before. Basically, I was having trouble with Placeshifter not working on some recordings and it was suggested to try a faster/newer CPU. So I upgraded from a Q6600-based platform to a Xeon E3-1235 one—along with the 32G RAM supported by the new C204-based MB. OK, way overkill for SageTV, but my plan was to also combine my servers into one.


Unfortunately the CPU upgrade didn’t solve my Placeshifter issues *sigh*. And what’s more when I started to carve out a VM I found that WHS2011 is limited to using at most 8G of RAM. C’mon, MS, really?!


So now I’m looking to switch things around so the new hardware can handle all server tasks without limitations. I’m not ready to give up WHS2011 as even though it’s the last “WHS” version MS will release it has benefits that I really like—mainly easy and space efficient desktop backups as well as remote access with a free SSL certificate/domain name for the time being, (until 2025 I read). But I don’t see a way to easily run SageTV in a VM due to my capture devices being PCIe-based. (Any experience with the latter? I have a Hauppauge 2550 for OTA and a Ceton InfiniTV4 for CableCard.)


Anyway as I see it I can’t run WHS2011 as the host OS because of its dumb RAM limitations. And although I looked into ESXi and Hyper-V as a core platform I’m concerned about access to the PCI capture cards in a guest OS so nixed those unless there’s evidence otherwise.


My thought now is to run an OS that can make full use of the available RAM, handle SageTV as well as other things that can be moved to it from Ubuntu, run WHS in a VM for desktop backup, remote access, and web server redirection purposes, and run a single Ubuntu LTS instance in another VM for basically Minecraft, (my kids kill the current server by setting off tons of TNT blocks their respective creative worlds just to see what happens—today that means a world restore pre-TNT and server restart, but I hope the new hardware will change that…)


I’m thinking the best bet is to go with Windows Server 2012 Essentials, but am leaning towards Windows 8 Professional, (the latter being much cheaper and the Professional version for RDP purposes as it works much nicer for remote access as opposed to things like UltraVNC). Any gotchas with SageTV on Win8? I’m also thinking Win8 over Win7 for Storage Spaces. It should handle my Hauppauge 2550 and Ceton InfiniTV 4 OK right? And for VMs I’m thinking VirtualBox, (proved OK personally with Ubuntu and from what I’ve read WHS2011).

[BobPhoenix]

I have two SageTV servers setup on two ESXi servers. On one I pass through an NEC USB 2.0 card for my HD-PVRs, AVer Media Duet dual tuner and a Hauppauge HVR-2250 dual tuner. On the other server I've got 2 Duet's and a single HVR-2250. I had to use a Sandy Bridge E3-1230 CPU and downgraded bios to Sandy Bridge only support (Tyan 1.05 or SuperMicro 1.0c) to get the Duet's to work. This was true for SuperMicro X9SCM-F and Tyan S5512GM2NR, S5512GM4NR MBs. The HVR-2250s worked with Sandy Bridge CPU and Ivy Bridge bios. Later this year I will be virtualizing a third server. All will be Sandy Bridge CPUs and Tyan S5512GM2NR and S5512GM4NR MBs. Windows 7 x64 VMs for each SageTV server along with 2 unRAID VMs each.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

Anyway as I see it I can’t run WHS2011 as the host OS because of its dumb RAM limitations. And although I looked into ESXi and Hyper-V as a core platform I’m concerned about access to the PCI capture cards in a guest OS so nixed those unless there’s evidence otherwise.

You should be able to run any hypervisor that supports PCI passthrough with your Xeon CPU & c204 motherboard. So you can use ESXi (though people have reported issues on 5.1, so it would be best to stick w/5.0). Since you already want linux on there, I'd suggest going with Ubuntu LTS & ZFS

Drew