Currently have Sagetv working with ESXi and hvr 1600

[itzatol]

Hi everyone,

In order to consolidate all of my servers into one computer and have energy savings, and newer hardware i decided to build an esxi box. The main problem I had is that i have an hvr 1600, so i need to get a motherboard that has Vt-D I/O, then on black friday there was a boxqd45cb on sale at zipzoomfly.

After looking up its specs i saw that it had vt-d and was able to do pci passthrough, I therefore bought it.

i also bought an antec p182 micro atx case. The rest I already had, here are the complete specs:

Intel Boxdq45cb MATX
8gb Corsair xms2 ddr2-800 ram
Intel Q9550 Quad core 2.8 processor
400w cooler master 70%+ efficient PSU
5 hard drives in there atm, totaling 5tb of space.
Verizon Fios
Motorola 2500 STB
HVR 1600

Problems I encountered with the board:
-Its not true hardware raid, so therefore esxi did not see my mirrors or raid 5.

-the pci e x16 slot can only be used as either a pcie x1 random card or pci x16 graphics card, which really hurt as i got a pcie x8 ibm RAID card, which works but disables the onboard graphics

Pointers:

-Give the VM 128mb video ram
-Make sure to enable vt-x and vt-d in the bios
-You must go into the virtual machine settings and change it from automatic to use VT-x or whatever option, you should easily find it. (my box would crash otherwise)


Other than that, I just installed windows home server, installed the k-lite codec mega pack, installed hauppauge drivers/sagetv. And it works. No sound card is needed for passthrough for the device, so dont worry about that.

I can also affirm everyone that this worked in a vista ultimate x64 vm in esxi as well.


If you have any questions please ask.

[cenwesi]

nice, care to share with us how much that box cost you?

[joematt]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813121357

[itzatol]

Case: $50
MOBO: $100
Ram: already had 8gb from my gaming box that i upgraded
hauppauge hvr 1600 = $100(bought a year ago)
Processor: $170(bought from micro center)
vmware esxi: free
WHS: $100
2 1.5TB drives(in software RAID 1): $200

total: $820

[itzatol]

I can confirm now that i also got it working with windows 7 32bit vm

[kbyrd]

Originally Posted by itzatol

If you have any questions please ask.

Ok, you've had this setup for a while, what did you end up doing for storage? Did you do a RAID card supported by ESX or something else? How do you like the setup?