VirtualBox 3.2.10

[BitBass]

I searched and didn't see any hits for this so I'm going to document how it goes.

My plan is to build SageTV 7 in Windows XP 32bit under a VB VM. I currently have 7 RC running on a standalone box that happens to be having some problems with hardware crashes.

I'll be building it under a Win7 host initially but I'll be moving it to a Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM.

At this point I only have an HDHR which should be trivial to get working. I don't see how being virtualized would cause a problem with that. I don't have an HD-PVR yet but that's in the list to buy. Of course, getting that to work through the USB passthrough will be one of my primary concerns.

Also, I use Unraid like what Stanger's been working on but I have it running on a dedicated server. Up to 10 drives and 7TB usable so far. I won't be using it any differently than I currently do which is to say I use SMB shares and a cache drive for the Live TV. I don't record TV locally to Sage but rather directly to Unraid via the cache drive. Again, I don't expect this to behave any differently with Sage virtualized.

SageTV will get 2GB of RAM to start with and I'll see how it goes. The initial build on the Win7 host will be on a Dual Core Pentium. Of course, the Mac Mini is a Core2Duo. The Pentium does not support VT.

Once I've moved to the Mac Mini I'll also be running an Asterisk (PIAF) guest supporting about 6 phones. The plan for the Mac Mini is to also run as an iTunes "server" of a sorts using Home Sharing. I'm sure some might ask why I'm going to a Mac Mini of all things. The current model supports 8GB of RAM for pretty cheap. Mainly, the power footprint is much smaller than the 3 distinct boxes I'm running right now. The Mini has an 85W PSU versus the 300W+ PSU's in the multiple servers. OS X is also much more aggressive about reducing the power use, although with VirtualBox running I'm not sure how often that'll actually come into play. Finally, I'm seriously considering a switch to Plex/EyeTV if Airplay ends up working for everything. I know it's kind of crappy to talk about competing solutions but it is what it is. Mainly I need to reduce my electric bill.

On a related note, I'd really like to see a "remote" for browsing and sending content from an iPad/iPhone to an extender. I'll save that for a different post.

[BitBass]

Wow, never searched for the Mobile Web Interface but that looks like it'll do the trick for part of my problem. Cool!

[BitBass]

The Mac Mini is on the way! Should be testing by next weekend.

[Nelbert]

I'll be curious to see how the USB passthough works out for you, I tried it and found VB USB speed sucked big time plugging a DVB-T tuner in directly.

It was fine for channel scans, but couldn't cope with the actual video/audio streams throughput.

[BitBass]

So based on the advice here and some other references I found I decided to try vmware fusion instead. Hdhr streams work great. Hd-pvr, not so much. Cranking down the quality to "fair", which is really pretty crappy, makes it viewable but only just. It still stutters occasionally. Anything above fair and it's unusable.

Is this all about the USB? I figure I'll have to resort to bootcamp if I can't get this working. Any ideas?

[paulbeers]

I've found the USB Passthru for any of the various Virtual Machine Software packages for the Mac to be somewhat limited. Actually any of the passthru (whether drive, USB, etc) to be limited. You are probably going to have to go the route of bootcamp.

[Tomahawk51]

On a related note...I have been watching with much novice interest the efforts like yours to pull of a 1 box "best of bread" solution for Sage, Storage (e.g. Unraid), etc.

It would be awesome to see some high level guidance for us intermediate users that aren't intimated, but also aren't sys admins.

For example: What *should* I do from the many options to consolidate storage (drive pooling w/redundancy) & run SageTV. What is the easiest or best performing recommendation collectively.

I do realize that different scenarios make this practically impossible...

[Nelbert]

Ethernet attached streamers should be fine because emulating the network hardware is very mature development, to the point that using the virtio drivers, or direct hardware access, isn't that necessary for many people.

The only other workable alternative I can think of to the USB would be to replace it with a pci/pcie device and to make use of Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi, which allows direct attachment of PCI/PCIe devices to a specific virtual machine.

The problem is finding a motherboard with fully working bios support and the the hypervisor if you don't want to use Linux KVM/Xen. Parallels Server supports Intel VT-d which suggests that the Mac motherboards support it properly. Doesn't help the USB problem though.

Passing disks and network to virtual machines shouldn't be a problem at all. virtio drivers, which are even in virtualbox, run the disks so close to native speed you shouldn't know it was virtualised. The big problem is if you only have a couple of disks, lots of vms and they all try and access the disk at once.

I've never tried it, but using Linux containers might give full access to the hardware. You can only run a single OS then, but can separate all the different servers into their own containers. No idea how much is any direct access the containers have to the host hardware though.

[BitBass]

Well, I made some progress by disabling the "Intel" USB controller that was installed in XP. This must have been conflicting with the USB bus the HD-PVR was coming across. It's not perfect in my limited testing but it's much improved.

Now I have a problem with Sage7 crashing the HD-PVR, I think. Off to read those posts as I recall seeing some people talking about that.

I'm not sure this is going to be a permanent solution yet but it's getting there.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by Tomahawk51

On a related note...I have been watching with much novice interest the efforts like yours to pull of a 1 box "best of bread" solution for Sage, Storage (e.g. Unraid), etc.

It would be awesome to see some high level guidance for us intermediate users that aren't intimated, but also aren't sys admins.

For example: What *should* I do from the many options to consolidate storage (drive pooling w/redundancy) & run SageTV. What is the easiest or best performing recommendation collectively.

My recommendation is to run a single server, single OS. The only reason to run things virtualized is if you need a different OS for a virtual NAS (like Unraid). I'd just forget the alphabet soup and run a single server (or workstation OS) that supports all your hardware. I've not had perfect success virtualizing anything that involves A/V. YMMV.

[Nelbert]

Originally Posted by Tomahawk51

On a related note...I have been watching with much novice interest the efforts like yours to pull of a 1 box "best of bread" solution for Sage, Storage (e.g. Unraid), etc.

It would be awesome to see some high level guidance for us intermediate users that aren't intimated, but also aren't sys admins.

For example: What *should* I do from the many options to consolidate storage (drive pooling w/redundancy) & run SageTV. What is the easiest or best performing recommendation collectively.

I do realize that different scenarios make this practically impossible...

I guess at a very, very high level there are 2 scenarios that need expanding for a 1 server sage/storage solution:
1) I want to run 1 server for my network storage and run SageTV as a server only.
2) I want to run SageTV as a server and client on 1 box and also use the box as a network server.

The details of h/w software choice is probably another thread on it's own to prevent a hijack here.

[thomaszoo]

Originally Posted by Nelbert

I guess at a very, very high level there are 2 scenarios that need expanding for a 1 server sage/storage solution:
1) I want to run 1 server for my network storage and run SageTV as a server only.
2) I want to run SageTV as a server and client on 1 box and also use the box as a network server.

The details of h/w software choice is probably another thread on it's own to prevent a hijack here.

In addition to the above it sounds like you really want to reduce power consumption from your previous posts. I would start with an 80+ power supply. I have an Intel i7-870 box that runs just a little over 60 watts with a PF close to 1. This thing rarely breaks a sweat so it seldom uses much more than that. You might be pleasantly surprised at the difference an efficient PS can make.

Previously I was running an Intel Atom. At idle it was around 30 watts, but a really bad PF. While it did fine at recording and playback it was speed limited at comskip (especially hd pvr files) and transcoding was out of the question.

Wayne

[Tomahawk51]

Originally Posted by Nelbert

1) I want to run 1 server for my network storage and run SageTV as a server only.
..
The details of h/w software choice is probably another thread on it's own to prevent a hijack here.

Yes 1 is my scenerio. I did feel bad after posting about a hijack...so sorry OP. Maybe I will post a new topic.

Thinking the following for my older C2Duo rig:
Win7 host w/Sage, maybe play with getting Unraid setup in a VM on that host.

[BitBass]

No worries! Just want to let everyone know, I decided to try Win7 as the guest instead. No problems! Well, mostly no problems. I got an occasional stutter but that might have been related to the JVM heap size which I bumped up to 768k. It's been clean since then. No more HD-PVR crashes either.

Something must be better about the Win7 drivers. It just works now.

I'll be setting up PIAF in a separate VM over the next couple of days so we'll see how that goes. I finished the initial install and the disk I/O was causing some real problems with SageTV but it never crashed. Just went back to normal operation when the I/O slowed down.

[kevinsky]

Originally Posted by BitBass

...
Once I've moved to the Mac Mini I'll also be running an Asterisk (PIAF) guest supporting about 6 phones. The plan for the Mac Mini is to also run as an iTunes "server" of a sorts using Home Sharing. I'm sure some might ask why I'm going to a Mac Mini of all things. The current model supports 8GB of RAM for pretty cheap. Mainly, the power footprint is much smaller than the 3 distinct boxes I'm running right now. The Mini has an 85W PSU versus the 300W+ PSU's in the multiple servers. OS X is also much more aggressive about reducing the power use, although with VirtualBox running I'm not sure how often that'll actually come into play...

Hi BitBass,

I read your post and im currenty also experimenting with piaf on my macmini. Im quite new at this. But what i see is that you managed to install Piaf on a macmini. The question is how you did that? Did you still run OS X snow leopard on this?
I have the latest macmini from 2010 and i want to keep my data/music on my macmini. Is it possible to create a VM (separate partition for running PIAF) next or on top of snow leopard? Or do i have to erase everything?

I also saw some old articles on Nerd Vittles using Proxmox, but that will erase everything and having a new OS installed. That is not what i want.

Hope you can shed some light into this.

Thanks,
Kevin