[mythtv-users] Mythbacked on ESXi 5.0

Richard Stanaford rstanaford at gmail.com
Mon Oct 24 17:37:23 UTC 2011


On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Kris B. <krisbee at krisbee.com> wrote:
>
>> None of those applications justifies dedicated hardware (the kids in
>> particular), even if I had the funds available to allocate.  Plus,
>> having the OS for each VM isolated to a single file that I can
>> snapshot in my sleep makes, "Daddy, my computer won't start anymore",
>> or, "My term paper is gone", scenarios easier to deal with.
>>
>> I was under the impression that the whole impetus behind the
>> development of virtualization was to consolidate the many, the
>> disparate in to one footprint.  "Reduce your management, reduce your
>> expenses and footprint on the environment, let virtualization do it
>> all for you!"
>>
>> Well, let it do it all, then.  Say you build a dedicated back end.
>> How many clock cycles are wasted with it just sitting there between
>> recording/transcoding sessions?  Even with a multi-core processor
>> grabbing analog streams with hardware-based encoders on the cards, the
>> processors are going to be bored.  The only question is how well can
>> the VM see the cards through the hypervisor and how efficiently that
>> data can be sent across the bus to the disks?  Multi-disk database
>> architectures run on virtualized environments all day, every day.
>
> Well, I think the idea is, why don't you just use the main OS to do all
> of that?  My home machine is the file server, print server, web server,
> transcoder, backend, ham radio computer/modem, and office machine for my
> home business, etc.  - but it all runs under the main machine, no
> virtualization.
>
> --
>  Kris B.
>  krisbee at krisbee.com
>
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>

I have indeed been giving that a lot of consideration, Kris.  I really
like VirtualBox, been using it a long time and it's done everything
I've ever needed it to and even occasionally surprised me.  I also
really like the ZFS file system.  I probably could build out the
hardware, run OpenSolaris on the bare metal, set up the disk array
NAS/SAN and all that, install the Solaris port of VirtualBox and build
the VMs on top of that (Development, Fedora-based MythTV
cookie-cutter, headless VMs for the kids to connect remotely, etc).

Lots of interesting possibilities.

-Rich


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