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

Christian Szpilfogel chrisznews4 at rogers.com
Fri Jan 15 06:00:46 UTC 2010


Johnny wrote:
>> Another consideration is trans-coding in a guest. I had not done this until
>> recently and I'm finding that transcoding h.264 for say commercial skip and
>> mp4 conversion is a bit taxing on the guest. So I may create a slave or two
>> just to offload those tasks into another guest and thus better utilize my
>> cores.
>>     
>
> That is a good point. How come you can't just give more cores to a
> guest? Spinning up another guest OS just to get some more cores seems
> like a waste of resources. I have only ever played with VMWare
> Workstation and VirtualBox and both of those let you assign multiple
> cores to a guest.
>   
You can assign multiple cores but then the guest has to schedule those 
cores even if you are not fully utilizing them. In other words if your 
guest only needs one core for its task it will still have to wait for 
all configured cores to be available and then tie them up for its 
quantum. That's my understanding of how VMWare works. So if I was 
continuously crunching, I might assign two cores instead of one but it 
may be more efficient to run a separate guest to do transcoding and let 
it run flat out away from the MBE. I'll have to run some tests to see 
which works better in my situation. My kids keep my recorders really 
busy as they record and then cherry pick what they want to watch.


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