New Server - SageTV+unRAID under ESXi 4.1

[stanger89]

I've tried both but even with physical ones I get the same issue chetebrown linked above. It's kind of weird because smartctl works fine.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by broconne

Update from my ESXi system. I have been having occasional recording blips on items recorded from my HDHR - everything I recorded from my HDPVR has been perfect. I enabled support on the HDHR, waited till I got a recording issue, and then I opened a ticket with SD support. Support told me that I was getting packet loss. Support pointed me to this document which enabled me to run a stress test and replicate the condition.

Thanks for posting that it's very interesting/helpful. I'm running that on my "production" box, and I now see that Cacti/PHP are causing packet loss with my HDHR every time the periodic SNMP polling occurs.

[stanger89]

So, interesting developments....

My desktop (i7 920, DX58SO) supports VT-d, so I figured I'd throw ESXi on a flash drive and see what happens if I passed through a USB controller and tried the R5000 on that.

First things first, some recent thread references a 2-device limit on passthrough, I didn't think much at the time, but I think we're confusing USB passthrough (which IIRC is limited to 2 devices) and PCI passthrough. I'm not sure if there's a limit, but ESXi let me pass all 6 USB controllers so it's definitely more than 2.

Now back to the R5000. I know the passthrough worked because my keyboard and some other stuff I tried passed through just fine. But for some reason the R5000 just would not show up on passed through. Didn't matter which USB port I tried, including ones other devices passed fine on.

So I guess, for all intents and purposes, you simply cannot use an R5000 in a VM. I'm at a loss for why it would fail to work on a passed through USB controller. That should take almost all virtualization issues out of the equation (at least as far as USB communication).

So back to the drawing board again....

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Now back to the R5000. I know the passthrough worked because my keyboard and some other stuff I tried passed through just fine. But for some reason the R5000 just would not show up on passed through. Didn't matter which USB port I tried, including ones other devices passed fine on.

Just to be clear, was this with USB pass through or a USB controller using PCI pass through / VM Direct-path?

[Fuzzy]

was this a fresh VM image? I can't see how it could NOT work with PCI passthrough, so there was probably some other problem making the R5000 not work. Did nothing show up in device manager when they were plugged in?

[stanger89]

PCI passthrough'd USB controller. Right nothign showed up. No indication anything had been plugged in.

[brainbone]

IIRC, before you can use PCI passthrough on a device, you need to make sure ESXi isn't already using the device. Since you were booting off USB, perhaps that's the issue? What was the "other stuff" you tried to pass through?

[stanger89]

Oh, the device/passthrough worked, I could plug other stuff into that port and it would show up fine. Unless maybe ESXi will "share" a keyboard on a passthroughed USB device, I didn't have quite the cable to try the back ports, only a couple of front ports, but they appeared to be passed through just fine.

[brainbone]

Out of curiosity, is this the method you used?
http://vm-help.com/esx40i/VMDirectPath/USB_Setup.php

I wonder if ESXi 4 (not 4.1), would behave differently?

[stanger89]

Yes it is.

[broconne]

Just an update here again.. I seem to be able to get my HDHR to work without doing passthrough on the NIC. I misunderstood the flexible adapter type. I thought the flexible adapter switched automatically after boot to be a VMXNET3 - but it looks like it actually just becomes the old VMXNET type. Once I switched it over to VMXNET3 - everything seems to be ok.. no packet loss.

[heffe2001]

I'm thinking of going the ESXi Sage/Unraid route (or at the very least, Sage & a couple other VM's doing various other jobs). I'm going to be using a IOMMU capable mobo (Biostar TA890FXE), with a AMD 810 2.6ghz Quad, with 4g to start, and an additional 4g within a week or 2 tops. My tuners are 2x HVR-2250's, and my unraid setup currently has 11 disks, plus another 3 or 4 drives currently in my Sage box. The main problem I see right now is the inability to spin down the Unraid drives, and I'm not sure how well the 2250's will work with the PCI pass through, dedicated to a Windows or Linux sage instance. (Which would run better, Sage for Linux, or should I just virtualize my existing WHS install?).

It'd be great if we could get unraid to run native under ubuntu, alongside a Sage install on the same machine...

[stanger89]

You could try getting Sage to run on Slackware with a custom unRAID build.

[heffe2001]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You could try getting Sage to run on Slackware with a custom unRAID build.

I'm thinking about doing just that, wonder how hard it'd be getting it running on slack, and getting those hvr's working as well, lol.

[stanger89]

It is linux, I wouldn't think it would be too bad. Can't be too much worse I wouldn't think than another "non-stock" distro.

[davephan]

Has anyone tried looking at a unRAID data drive with a Linux computer? I understand the files should be visible. I hooked up an unRAID data drive to a Ubuntu 10.10 computer, and I couldn't see any files on the unRAID data drive. The drive looked like it wasn't formatted and needed to be formatted.

Dave

[stanger89]

They weren't auto mounted for me when I tried, but they mounted just fine, they're reiserfs.

[brainbone]

For those that can't get unraid to spin down Physical RDM drives in ESXi, does "hdparm -y /dev/sdX" (where X is one of your drives (a,b,c etc.)) work to spin the drive(s) down?

[stanger89]

Well, last night I ordered an X7SPA-HF, RAM and a Flash key and I'm planning on just installing unRAID directly on that, and I'll move Sage from my current Athlon XP machine to my spare Athlon 64 BE-2400.

I may play with undervolting/underclocking the Athlon BE to see how low I can get the power draw.

Originally Posted by brainbone

For those that can't get unraid to spin down Physical RDM drives in ESXi, does "hdparm -y /dev/sdX" (where X is one of your drives (a,b,c etc.)) work to spin the drive(s) down?

I think we both posted above that that fails (I think another forum/thread was linked to, with the same problem).

[heffe2001]

Soon as I get a few more parts in for the system so I can test it, I'm going to give both the SageTV/Slackware/unRAID install a try, as well as a ESXi unraid/SageTV VM setup.

I'm hoping I can get Sage running on Slackware64 13.1, as I'm planning on running 8g of memory in this box. I'd also like to run a WinXP vm on the system for things like SA, but I'm not 100% decided I'm going to do that yet..

My playon server will move over to my main desktop, it's got MORE than enough horsepower to do the required transcoding even when I'm currently using the PC...