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

[Christian Szpilfogel]

Johnny wrote:
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Ahh that makes sense. I didn't realize that is how it works. I would
> be interested to know which arranges works best for you. Thanks for
> the explanation
As a follow up, I chose to set up two virtual machines. One is my master 
backend which houses all critical functions to the operation of my 
system + HD-PVR recorders. The second is dedicated to commercial 
flagging and transcoding. I found that transcoding of HD-PVR content to 
have occasional issues which could cause instability. Given I am using 
LinHES (aka Knoppmyth), which is an appliance implementation of Mythtv, 
setting up myth in a VM guest takes all of about 20 minutes. So even if 
the transcoding blows up the family still has their MythTV. The MBE can 
run within 1GB of RAM and the transcoding slave needs less than 500MB 
(after several days it hasn't consumed more than 300MB).

As a general strategy you could delegate any of the functions out this 
way for stability and performance. The load on the host is trivial.