NextPVR on a VM, or a VM host..

[psycik]

So I've been thinking about what I'd like to do with my system.

Currently my PVR (as per the specs below) in sitting in the lounge in a pretty generic black case next to the tv. Looks like a sub TBH. Bwhaha I just laughed at my own pun - hi sub!!

Anyway. I also have a Windows Home Server 2011 server. Currently with 4 x 2 TB disks, 2 are RAID 1 mirrored, and 2 are standalone. Windows Home Server 2011 is the base OS, with Vmware Server 2 on it running a Windows 7 VM (my primary desktop), an ubuntu server (proxy server) and 2 windows 2003 servers (one for general utilities, and one for more media based stuff - plex, itunes etc).

As it's now maxed out with drives, my next move would be to add a Lian-Li 5 Drive RAID enclosure, giving me another 8 TB or storage (I'.d possible canniblise some of the other 2tb drives into this enclosure).


This led me to thinking about how well would a NextPVR recording service do either on the bare metal, or utilising a USB tuner and a HDHomeRun a nextpvr instance in a VM.

How much would the VMs both CPU and IO affect the recording capabilities of next pvr, would this be a stupid move, and should I keep both machines seperate or would it be fairly safe to combine the two systems. I generally have a couple of shows recorded each day, client access would be evenings and night times, server backups etc during the day (only because the WHS server is turned off over night - this would be moved to overnight with the server being on 24x7).

Thoughts?

[Northpole]

Don't mean to side track your thread but I was thinking of adding a similar storage enclosure and wondered what you liked about the Lian-Li 5? I have a friend that has a couple of Drobos but they seem a little pricey.

[martint123]

I'm not sure what the "VMware server 2" product is, but when I recently had a play with the freebie ESXI and VSphere thingies on my HP microserver these products do not support passthrough of underlying hardware like tuners - which is a great shame.

I was hoping for NPVR VM's and a linux VM for my smargo/cardserver but that is USB and not passed through ;(

[psycik]

Don't mean to side track your thread but I was thinking of adding a similar storage enclosure and wondered what you liked about the Lian-Li 5? I have a friend that has a couple of Drobos but they seem a little pricey.

Availability more than anything else. It's a product available here for a fairly reasonalble price. Also 5 bay.

Ideally I'd prefer standard sata interface, but I'd make do with eSata. Yeah drobos I find expensive as well, and not sure I like the USB idea. This one I'll just plug into WHS2011 and use it as one big disk.

[psycik]

I'm not sure what the "VMware server 2" product is, but when I recently had a play with the freebie ESXI and VSphere thingies on my HP microserver these products do not support passthrough of underlying hardware like tuners - which is a great shame.

I was hoping for NPVR VM's and a linux VM for my smargo/cardserver but that is USB and not passed through ;(

I thought ESXi could pass PCI cards through? Hmm, anyway vmware server can (it runs on top of windows/linux etc, rather than being the base os like esx is).

It's more IO throughput I'm worried about.

[lovemyram4x4]

I've actually been testing w/ NPVR on server 2008 R2 and on 1 of it's win 7 VMs, if been busy trying to work so issues w/ netowrkrecorder+SageDCT but I didn't notice much difference between the 2, I'll get some better feed back once I get things sorted out better but Hyper-v may give differnt results than Vmware Server 2.

[psycik]

I've actually been testing w/ NPVR on server 2008 R2 and on 1 of it's win 7 VMs, if been busy trying to work so issues w/ netowrkrecorder+SageDCT but I didn't notice much difference between the 2, I'll get some better feed back once I get things sorted out better but Hyper-v may give differnt results than Vmware Server 2.

I found Hyper-V to be a bit more responsive that Vmware server....but it was annoying to deal with. Security on folders, paths all over the place, no USB, no remote management. This is why I went back to vmware server.

[lovemyram4x4]

Hyper-v has remote management, I'm not sure what security on folder your talking about in relations w/ Hyper-V. Did you use the stand alone version of Hyper-v(similar to ESXi) or run it as a role on the host OS? I haven't tried the stand alone version, not sure if offers anything different than running it from within Server 2008 R2.

[psycik]

Hyper-v has remote management, I'm not sure what security on folder your talking about in relations w/ Hyper-V. Did you use the stand alone version of Hyper-v(similar to ESXi) or run it as a role on the host OS? I haven't tried the stand alone version, not sure if offers anything different than running it from within Server 2008 R2.

Really? I saw an addon, but couldn't get it to work - and didn't feel like writing a bunch of scripts to deal with it.

When a VM is created, special folder permissions are attached to the folder, it made copying and moving VMs around on drives really painful - you just dont have this problem with vmware.

[lovemyram4x4]

I've only seen ran across that w/ windows virtual PC w/ a XPmode VM but I think it was because the VM was in hibernate as I just moved/deleted/added some XP mode VM on a Win 7 machine running windows virtual PC.