[mythtv-users] Virtualisation in the home network – ready for mainstream?

[Brian Wood]

On Wednesday 02 September 2009 18:23:01 Jarod Wilson wrote:

> Ugh, bonghits, wasn't aware it had gotten that bad. Fortunately, I don't
> have to buy much of anything, its all provided by hardware vendors, who
> tend to not send their low-end cheap crap our way.

So you're saying they send their high-end crap your way?

I was a little surprised my Opteron 275s and 280s do not have the the hardware 
bits, but in any case VirtualBox works just fine without them. Those are 
fairly recent CPUs, but they were what I could get a deal on.

Intel's nomenclature is horrible, I often see "dual core Pentium" machines on 
offer, which of course are not core 2 duos. It's like they purposely confused 
the nomenclature so they could sell old crap to unknowing buyers.

AMD is not as bad at naming things, though even they are getting worse.

I've found VirtualBox to be quite good, though you do need an underlying full 
OS. I just got so frustrated with VMWare, every time there was a kernel 
update. I think you're right, if you are not building a server farm they 
really don't care about you.

Any time you have a product you paid for, and find yourself running a free 
alternative, something is wrong (with the commercial product, that is).

VMs that users can connect to with an RDP client are very nice, and a good way 
to use old hardware. It doesn't take much hardware to display a remote 
desktop, and with gigabit ethernet things move right along. With the 
USB "forwarding" users can then plug a device into the remote client and the 
server can use it just fine, a real benefit that I don't think anyone else 
has.

It's basically "thin client" computing, without a lot of the hassles.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org