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

[Greg Woods]

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 15:51 +1000, Jon Whitear wrote:

> This raises a few questions, first of which is “Is virtualisation
> ready for the mainstream?”

The answer, from my experience, is "it depends". I can't speak for
Gentoo, you might be better off asking in a Gentoo forum. My experience
is with Fedora. 

Getting VMware workstation to work is always a struggle. I have to find
the magic vmware-any-any-update# that works. I have yet to get it
working under Fedora 11; the kernel modules fail to build. Fedora 11
does come with KVM virtualization out of the box. My experience with
that is mixed. I have only tried running Windows XP VM's because that's
what I really need it for (the usual small handful of proprietary
applications that I'm forced to use at work plus some games). On my work
systems, both of which have Intel Core 2 processors, one a laptop and
one a desktop, it was easy to set up and the performance is very good.
Hard to tell I'm in a VM. At home, where I have a dual core Pentium 4
system, performance is horrible. Some applications are so slow that they
are unusable. Shutdowns don't work cleanly, I frequently have to restart
the libvirtd service. To boot the blasted thing I usually have to try 3
or 4 times; it crashes down to the "safe mode" boot screen repeatedly,
but if I keep telling Windows to boot normally, it eventually does (then
it's slow).

So from my experience, KVM performance depends on exactly what hardware
you have.

--Greg