has anyone attempted to use VMware's Vcenter converter to convert an existing LINHES install into a virtual machine? The machine I want to convert is a backend so I'm not worried about playback performance.

Feedback on your experiences using VMware converter or other physical to virtual migration tools would be appreciated.

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

I have not used the converter as I've been running virtualized pretty much from the beginning. If you are using vCenter then you are using ESXi. I would expect the performance to be just fine. I use VMWare Server 2 which does very well and ESXi is far more efficient. I have two HD-PVR tuners on it.

As a precaution I have set up two slave backends to do the transcoding just so I don't burden the the master with that. I use a single core for each.

Let me know how it goes with ESXi. I'm planning to move over to that soon once I get some of my custom drivers done to support my storage.

Thanks for the reply. I was planning to use the converter and vmplayer -- what is the role of ESXi?

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Oh I see.

vCenter is also the management console of ESXi. ESXi is the bare metal virtualization option. VMware Server is also a server app but it expects an OS underneath it. VMPlayer is meant as a desktop solution and also expects an OS underneath it.

Very helpful info, thanks. Any idea if a virtualized frontend will work well? Does it get access to VDPAU acceleration on the ION Platform?

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

I suspect VMWare player might but I'm not certain.

VDPAU would require direct access to the GFX card - not trivial. For starters, you would definitely need a 'bare metal' virtualization technology such as Xen or ESXi. It would be tricky to configure I'd bet.

I run my MBE in Oracle's VirtualBox with all my tuners in an old P4 desktop which I wake from the MBE when recordings are about to begin. I love this setup. My frontends (and SBE) boot disklessly from the MBE so if I take a snapshot of the MBE I have instantly backed up my entire system. It also allows me to implement new versions of LH easily - merely shutdown the R6 VM (say) and boot up my test R7 one. Rinse & repeat until R7 is solid. Wife & kids are happier that way too

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Paul O'Flynn

I have 6.04 runnning using VMware. The conversion did not work. After spending several hours debugging it and moving it forward one step at a time, I decided it was easier to build the VM from scratch. I have not been able to successfully install the VMware Linux guess OS tools, as they are expected the "rc0.d" initialization structure and LINHES dosn't use that method. At this stage of the game I can confirm that VDPAU acceleration is not working -- don't know for sure what would happen if I figured out how to get those tools installed, but given Paul's comments, not sure it's worth flogging.


Paul, any feedback on the pros and cons of Oracle's solution vs. VMware's?

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about VMWare to make a good comparison but I'm sure you could probably google one. What I do know is that VMWare is commercial & "enterprisey" while VirtualBox is more of a home solution and it is OpenSource. I started my VM life with VMWare but ended up switching as VBox seemed "lighter", simpler, did everything I needed and it didn't have any features only available to those who paid a lot of money.

VBox is pretty darned impressive. I've been running my MBE in it for years now. V4.1 was recently released and to my shock it had 'preliminary' support (read 'flaky') for PCI passthru but PCI cards & PCI GFX cards are two very different things I have read with the latter unlikely ever to be supported in VirtualBox, for example.

What exactly are your requirements/is your setup? IIR you don't use Myth as a frontend anymore thus you are only interested in virtualizing the backend? But then w/o PCI passthru for tuner cards you will not be able to have any PCI-based tuner cards in your MBE and would need a non-virtualized SBE for them (but you could use USB-based tuner cards). I have read of folks who manually installed the minimum of stuff required for an SBE which ran on the same physical h.w as their virtualized MBE.

BTW I have /myth stored on my host OS and shared via NFS with the FEs & SBE and shared via VirtualBox's SharedFolders with the MBE.

I think you live about 45mins from me - you're welcome to swing by sometime for a cup of authentic Irish tea and discuss the matter further

Paul

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Paul O'Flynn

Agreed this is my biggest quibble. The VMWare tools won't load on ArchLinux. There is an open-tools in arch that is used instead but it requires a more advanced kernel than 6.xx. I'm hoping with 7.xx that open-tools will work.

I need the vmware-tools to allow for graceful shutdown more than anything.

I could have forced open-tools into 6.xx but it seemed to require too many dependencies so I'll just wait until we catch up.

The "guest additions" on VBox always installed just fine for me, both on R5 & R6. Just did it about two weeks ago on the latest version of VBox on R6.03.

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Paul O'Flynn

Paul, I don't have any specific requirements yet -- I am doing this right now to learn more about virtualization and gather ideas on other ways to set up my systems.

Getting together sounds good -- what timing works for you?

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Wait - I take that back. I do remember now having some issues with the whole rc thing a long time ago on VBox, I had forgotten that, hmmm, works fine now though, something must have changed, no idea what but I'm not complaining

ArchLinux was not an option in VBox, I have it set to "Other Linux".

Marc, will PM you.

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Paul O'Flynn

An informational post -- in case people are interested. Configuration:

1. LINHES 6.04

2. Recordings go to CIFS/SAMBA mounted file system that is located on Dlink DNS321 NAS.

3. Tuner is HDHOMERUN.

When run on a dual-core ATOM 330 ION system recording 1 stream uses 33% - 50% of the host system's CPU.

When run on a quad-core Q9300 record 2 streams barely moves the needle on CPU utilization.

Not surprised that the Q9300 does so well, but I am disappointed that the Atom 330 CPU gets used so heavily when recording. As a precaution I exited the front end and check to make sure that there were not any background jobs running.

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Marc

The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

HDHomerun? NAS for /myth? Dude - this is begging to be virtualized

PCI tuners are the biggest deterrent to virtualizing LH in my mind, so if you're using HDHomeRuns or USB tuners etc, you have no excuses. For me, the instant backup and ability to play w/o fear of destroying everything were reasons enough to go virtual..

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Paul O'Flynn