[mythtv-users] Going Virtual and upgrading tuners

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 10:11 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
....
>     Virtualization is as old as Unix, if not older.

Yes, and there is an observation from Robert Creasy from
that period regarding full virtualization:

   The M44/44X was about as much of a virtual machine system as
   CTSS – which is to say that it was close enough to a virtual machine
   system to show that 'close enough' did not count.

That statement is still true today.  Close enough will work
some of the time.  It does not work for everything (and in
particular, I/O peripherals(*)(**)) due to the only
approximation to full virtualization.  Ask on almost any
driver list (ex: LinuxTV) about their opinions of virtualization
and device driver issues (usually quirks that are only
seen in virtual environments are 'not their problem').

That all said, the OP was talking about an enterprise
quality server, using a network only tuner.  That makes
it likely it will work with minimal issues (presuming
those Cisco C-series servers are not otherwise overloaded).
And while that it does not address the issue as to whether
virtualization is the best tool for this job, the OP has
provided a good reason for this choice for his particular
case, using enterprise equipment.  Those who have
C-series (or equivalent) hardware, with 192GB, and
10GbE switches in their environment may very well
choose a different path and achieve success.  Their
experience will not be able to be compared, or used
as a lesson, with the typical 'home user'.

Gary

(*) Sometimes you can use various passthru capabilities,
but there are often too many quirks to be assured that
they will work 100% of the time in a virtualized environment

(**) There are some hardware platforms/devices that fully
support virtualization and hardware resource partitioning.
Those adapters are extremely rare in the home market
space (even used, I think just one of the ethernet adapters
is around $600, and that is just one ethernet adapter).