[mythtv-users] VMWare on the backend. Viable solution?

Kenni Lund kenni at kelu.dk
Mon Jan 11 22:42:50 UTC 2010


2010/1/11 greg pryzby <greg at pryzby.org>:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Kenni Lund <kenni at kelu.dk> wrote:
>>
>> 2010/1/11 Jeppe Nejsum Madsen <jeppe at ingolfs.dk>:
>> > On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Martin Ravell
>> > <martin.ravell at rave-tech.com.au> wrote:
>> >> What do you think? Is VMWare with MythBackend on a (probably Fedora or
>> >> CentOS) virtual machine a viable option? I may add some more front-ends
>> >> as
>> >> well but at this stage it will be one of each.
>> >
>> > Performance wise it should be fine, but I don't think you can use your
>> > TV card in the VM?
>> >
>> > AFAIK, Xen is the only virtualization technology that allows pci pass
>> > through. I've been using this successfully with both a PVR 250 and now
>> > a Nova-T 500
>>
>> Since it's a Core i7 CPU, there's a good possibility that you'll have
>> a VT-d capable chipset, which will allow hardware-supported
>> passthrough of PCI and PCI-express devices in KVM [1] or Xen [2] (or
>> Vmware if you really want to use such things ;)).
>
> KVM works as does VMware.

Cool :)

> The issue you need to consider is what are the tuners. KVM only supports USB
> 1.x which could (pretty sure it is iirc) be an issue for HD-PVR (1212) for
> HD.

I suppose you can overcome this by adding a $20 USB controller card
and use PCI passthrough to dedicate all of these USB ports to a
virtual machine. I haven't tried it though.

Best Regards
Kenni Lund


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