[mythtv-users] Virtualisation in the home network – ready for mainstream?

[Jon Whitear]

With the upcoming release of .22, I’m looking at upgrading my backend  
box (P4, 1GB RAM) which also serves as web server, mail server, media  
storage, Asterisk box etc., all currently running under Gentoo.

Ideally, I would like to use VM appliances such as Mythbuntu, Zimbra  
and TrixBox with the aim of minimising maintenance and maximising  
functionality (e.g. move from plain postfix to Zimbra, have working  
IMAP voicemail.)

This raises a few questions, first of which is “Is virtualisation  
ready for the mainstream?”, i.e. can it be deployed without too much  
tinkering under the hood and other voodoo, and is it stable? There  
doesn’t seem to have been much talk about virtualisation on the list  
recently, so I thought it would be interesting to hear other people’s  
experiences and advice.

If the answer to that question is “yes”, which of the  
virtualisation options is “best”. KVM looks good because it’s  
rolled into the kernel, but I prefer the idea of allocating a  
partition to a VM, rather than running an image in a file, and that  
seems tricky in KVM. Xen seems to present a few issues e.g. domU CPU  
usage invisible to dom0, so CPU frequency scaling difficult. I’d  
prefer to stick with Gentoo as the ‘base’ OS, as that’s the devil  
I know. I don’t need any hardware pass-through, as I’ll go with an  
HDHomerun.

Also, given that I’ll be needing new hardware for this box, does  
anybody have any advice on what to look for? I’d be looking towards  
the value end of the range: it looks like Intel’s Core i5 won’t  
have virtualisation (to start with, at least) and the i7’s too  
expensive. Core 2 Quads seem to have VT-x, but chipsets with VT-d seem  
scarce (should I care about VT-d?) On the AMD side Phenom IIs have AMD- 
V, but IOMMU looks like a moving target. I assume four cores and 4GB  
RAM should do the job.

Cheers,

Jon


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