[mythtv-users] Virtualisation .. can it do this? (HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L)
Damian
myth at surr.co.uk
Tue Sep 25 20:25:07 UTC 2012
On 25/09/2012 17:09, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Damian wrote:
>
>> I have noticed, from forums etc, that almost everyone who owns one of
>> these things uses some sort of technology to run different virtual
>> OS's on it. I couldn't really see the point of this unless you are
>> either a developer or an uber-geek (a term I use with the greatest
>> respect .. I am a merely a semi-geek). It just sounds to me like
>> there's more that can go wrong than if I was just running the machine
>> with a standard OS. And I had heard that USB tuners could be a
>> headache to get working in a virtual machine.
>>
>> I hate things that don't just work these days and can't bare the
>> headache when things go wrong (I must be getting old!)
>>
>> However, I did have a thought this morning.
>>
>> One thing that constantly trips my up with Mythbuntu is
>> upgrading/updating it. I know a lot of you would say, if it's not
>> broke, don't fix it. But I like to have the latest stable version of
>> MythTV.
>>
>> So, my question is, could virtualisation help with this?
>
> Yes, but I think it's probably overkill for what you want.
>
> I bought one of the earlier N36L Microservers, with the intention of
> running MythTV and my other services on it. However I found that my
> tuners (PCIe, HVR-1300) didn't work with Xen loaded and more than 4G
> of physical RAM in the machine. Didn't work as in, in Dom0 they were
> recognised but any attempt to tune anything returned no data.
> Since they were still on cashback I bought another for everything else
> and kept one just for Myth.
>
> What I'd suggest is rather than going for virtualisation, use LVM for
> everything but a /boot filesystem*. Then it's fairly simple to just
> create additional LVs, clone your current system over to them
> (remembering to tweak things like /etc/fstab), and then reboot into
> the newly made copy. Your original remains safe and sound while you
> experiment - and when you are ready you can just make the new version
> your live system by setting the default boot entry in grub.
> * If you do keep a physical partition for /, then you may want to keep
> another spare one for your tests.
> Obviously you need to keep enough spare room in your LVM VG for any
> extra volumes you might need.
>
> This does have the downside that you have to shut down your live
> system while working on the new one - but as long as you keep an eye
> on the schedules/upcoming recordings then it should be too hard to
> find reasonable windows to work in. On the other hand, since you'll
> probably need your hardware (tuners etc) for some of the testing/setup
> then you'd still need to shutdown your live system even if you were
> running full virtualisation.
>
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
I'm thinking that I'm probably best just setting up Ubuntu/Mythbuntu as
the OS, and then when I want to 'upgrade', I could just backup the
system drive before breaking everything so that I can recover from it
when all goes bad and try again. I have made an image of a drive before
using some sort of live CD. It was fairly straight forward. Actually, it
was probably 'PartImage' that I used, as mentioned earlier.
The idea of having several different 'boot partitions' was nice too.
Thanks again everyone. I agree that setting up a virtualisation system
is overkill for my needs when the other suggestions will give me the
same 'safety net' without virtualisation.
Cheers all!
Damian
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