Before I dump my failed SuperMicro/Intel UNRAID setup...

[btrcp2000]

I am out of ideas having beaten on this since July. I cannot get a stable VM setup on this server, which means I have wasted about 8 months worth of a 2 year Dish network commitment. I have tried:

Win7 32bit and win10 64 bit
Colossus 1- required nightly reboots which in turn hard froze the whole server every other night or so
Colossus 2- worked like a dream for about 8 hours including 5.1 sound but disappeared this morning. Still works with hauppauge capture, but sage seems to have lost sight of it.
HDPVR2 -works fine but the VM loses the USB card periodically

I really think this is just a bad combination of hardware and an expensive lesson, but I don't think I could have known in advance. Hopefully someone following behind me can avoid these issues.

Plan now is to start over focusing first and foremost on h/w combinations known to work with Hauppauge stuff, so I will be reading up here and lime. I know there are ethernet network encoders out there, but I put a bunch of money into surround sound for a reason, not ready to give that up, and thos aren't cheap anyway.

[will]

Have you considered not VMing STV and running that natively on the host OS and then using VM software to run other containers (docker) or things you need (VMware Workstation - which I use)?

I originally wanted to VM Sage on a KVM Ubuntu host but after spending about a week's worth of time on it decided it wasn't worth the hassles. In a few hours I was able to get a Windows 7 64bit image running that acts as my host OS and then run two other VMs on top of it in Workstation.

Sure you might squeeze out better performance if you run bare metal but unless you are doing crazy things on your system you probably won't notice the increase/decrease in performance. I've been very happy with this setup and even happier that I'm not wasting time on a complex system.

It seems like the Hauppauge stuff needs Window drivers, especially if you want to start using things like the HD PVR 60 (which I plan to hookup this weekend) and is Windows only.

My opinion is VM is great for anything software base but once you start passing through hardware, especially consumer hardware, it becomes unstable and your better off running natively.

Sorry I don't have much help to share, I just thought I'd share my experience.

[btrcp2000]

I have considered and tried just about everything. I've been holding out for Gemstone + 5.1 sound + premium channels. Only way to get that in the same box is a flavor of linux that can run windows in a VM, hence UNRAID. If it just plain didn't work ever, I would have given up months ago. It's stable enough that it seems like there is just a bug or two left to squish.

I traced my most recent failure to a USB card, so I found another one laying around and stubbed it. Working right now with 2 Colossus 2's and 5.1 sound, except if I need to reboot the entire server manually it will take two attempts and result in a parity check. If it makes it 3 nights without crashing I will have officially broken new ground.

[will]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

I traced my most recent failure to a USB card

I don't use unraid but I believe it uses KVM so I'm sorry if my question isn't relevant...

Are you using a dedicated USB card with PCI passthrough to your VM? I know PCI passthrough can help with stability over individually assigning USB ports from the motherboard.

[btrcp2000]

Yes, I'm on my 3rd stubbed card, this one is an Inateck brand with a Fresco chipset. The other two were Renesas and Via. They would install just fine but eventually just disappear from the VM. Survived one night so far.

[will]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Yes, I'm on my 3rd stubbed card, this one is an Inateck brand with a Fresco chipset. The other two were Renesas and Via. They would install just fine but eventually just disappear from the VM. Survived one night so far.

In preparation for when I was planning to virtualize Sage, I read that NEC chipsets are the best for passthrough, at least with ESXi - the first route I was planning to take (totally different than KVM and unraid).

I purchased a Syba PCI -Expres USB 2.0 5-port Host Controller Card that uses a NEC chipset.

I don't know if it would fix your problem. I've been using the card in my build since November and haven't had any issues, I have three HD-PVRs and a USB-UIRT on it.

[BobPhoenix]

On my ASRock - EP2C602-4L/D16 board I had this passed through to a Windows VM

IOMMU group 19
	[1912:0014] 02:00.0 USB controller: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)

I went several weeks before I had a problem with any devices attached to it. The only consistent problem was the same problem I always had with ESXi. When first starting the VM after a host boot I would have to power cycle my HD-PVRs before they would show up in Windows VM device manager. But just rebooting the VM did not require this.

I am on 6.3.5 not later versions of unRAID and the Windows VM was v7 not 8, 8.1 or 10.


Some day I'll upgrade my unRAID VM server host but not until I can get the drive listing to the same spacing as "narrow" on "Table View Spacing" in 6.3.5.

[btrcp2000]

I picked up another Colossus 2 to eliminate the USB issue. I think this part is resolved now, at least for two nights in a row. I had to reboot the VM for unrelated reasons and it all fell apart as I apparently still have an issue with rebooting. The Fresco card came back up though by itself.

I also have this, which comes through as a Renesas. It would disappear occasionally.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/4...PCIe_Host_Cardhad

[rxnelson]

Only thing I can think of off the top, do you allow the VM to sleep? Maybe since it is lasting for a bit and disappearing that is the issue?

[btrcp2000]

No, it never sleeps. I have had so many problems with sleep states in general over the past several decades I gave up on that years ago. VM runs just fine until it needs to reboot, when it brings down everything. Just happened again with brand new RAM.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

No, it never sleeps. I have had so many problems with sleep states in general over the past several decades I gave up on that years ago. VM runs just fine until it needs to reboot, when it brings down everything. Just happened again with brand new RAM.

Have you set unRAID (we are still talking unRAID here?) to the performance governer?

[btrcp2000]

Yes, still UNRAID. Don't know anything about governor. Are there some specific settings that would deal with stability and not so much performance? Most things I'm seeing have to do with gaming

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Yes, still UNRAID. Don't know anything about governor. Are there some specific settings that would deal with stability and not so much performance? Most things I'm seeing have to do with gaming

The performance governor would have the cores running at peak speed and no sleeping. Something I always want on my server that has VMs. That way when the card is trying to write to disk there are no slow downs waiting for a core to wake up and release the buss for DMA from the card. If the card doesn't do DMA when recording then even more reason to have the cores running full speed as much as possible. At least that is my theory. Someone else that knows more may contradict my theory but I had problems on an ESXi box and when I switched to performance mode on it the recording breakups were reduced - from close to 25% down to maybe 1%. Was quite a while ago and may not make a difference to a Colossus card but it will only cost you a little more electricity to test it out. Doubt it would affect your reboot problems with the VM however.