[mythtv-users] Virtualized MythTV?

[Misty P]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Danie Brink" <danie.brink at gmail.com>
To: <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 8:35 AM
Subject: [mythtv-users] Virtualized MythTV?


> I've been using MythTV at home for a while & it works great. I've just 
> been
> asked to come up with something similar for an apartment complex. Anyone
> ever tried running a BE under Xen/VMWare? I need (for a start) 20 separate
> BE systems and ideally want to avoid getting 20 physical machines (I'd 
> have
> to start dangling boxes out the little server room's window).
>
> I was thinking of putting 5 virtual servers on each server (Dual Xeon 3GHz
> QC machines with 12GB RAM each & a PVR-250 or Plextor TV402U dedicated to
> each virtual machine). The servers have tons of storage so I'm not too
> concerned about transcoding, just recording & playing back pre-encoded 
> video
> files (MPEG2 & DivX) & serving up photos & mp3s.

Thinking a bit laterally, why virtualize at all?  Why a not a few big dual 
socket quad core boxes (8 cores total), plus a stack of HDHRs?

Then (and this might require a bit of code spelunking) prohibit anyone from 
deleting anything already recorded.  Just set a universal policy of "30 days 
and it's gone" (or some such) and let the backends handle file expiration.

(Just a thought...)

About the only bad thing would be the lady with a thousand cats in 4C that 
watches PBS all day long...  :)



Oh, and I've tried running the front end in VMware.  Don't.  It works, 
sllllllllllllooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwly.    It's actually faster to ssh 
into a backand and pipe back an X session on the same LAN.