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

Christian Szpilfogel chrisznews4 at rogers.com
Mon Jan 11 23:50:51 UTC 2010


Martin Ravell wrote:
>
> I’m just about to put in a new box for my home server and am thinking 
> about changing my Myth setup as well. I’d appreciate your comments if 
> you have done anything similar:
>
> ...
>
> 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.
>
I've run my myth MBE on VMWare for a couple of years with no issue. When 
I had analogue tuners (PVR-500), I left them on the host side and 
installed the basics for a slave backend on the host which then 
registered with the master. This worked very reliably. I was running 
CentOS so the backend RPMs where easy to grab from atrpms.

I now use HD-PVRs which pass through to MBE on VMWare 2 via USB and this 
works a treat. However I channel change via ieee1394 so I use ssh to 
execute the command on the host for channel changes as VMWare doesn't 
support ieee1394 pass through.

I really like having the MBE virtualized it makes backups, upgrades, and 
various management operations much simpler. In fact it allows me to use 
a canned distro (LinHES/KnoppMyth) so installs are straigh forward 
essentially like installing an appliance.

For example on my upgrade from 0.20 to 0.21: snapshot the VM, do an 
upgrade, if something gets weird or I make mistakes no problem... revert 
to snapshot and try again. This time with 0.21 to 0.22 I backed up my 
0.21 and created a new 0.22 based VM and did a restore there. Now I have 
my old 0.21 system available (on ice) in case I need to refer back to it.

Hope that helps.



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