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

[Jarod Wilson]

On 09/02/2009 08:59 PM, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 September 2009 18:23:01 Jarod Wilson wrote:
>
>> Ugh, bonghits, wasn't aware it had gotten that bad. Fortunately, I don't
>> have to buy much of anything, its all provided by hardware vendors, who
>> tend to not send their low-end cheap crap our way.
>
> So you're saying they send their high-end crap your way?

Mostly, yeah. Tends to be workstation-class or high-end desktop crap.

> I was a little surprised my Opteron 275s and 280s do not have the the hardware
> bits, but in any case VirtualBox works just fine without them. Those are
> fairly recent CPUs, but they were what I could get a deal on.

They really aren't very recent. :) There weren't any socket 940 AMD cpus 
that had hardware virt extensions, AMD didn't add them until the next 
socket type.

> Intel's nomenclature is horrible, I often see "dual core Pentium" machines on
> offer, which of course are not core 2 duos. It's like they purposely confused
> the nomenclature so they could sell old crap to unknowing buyers.

Yup.

> AMD is not as bad at naming things, though even they are getting worse.

To be quite honest, I've not paid much of any attention to any AMD procs 
recently, outside of their (iirc) 45W dual-core stuff...

> I've found VirtualBox to be quite good, though you do need an underlying full
> OS. I just got so frustrated with VMWare, every time there was a kernel
> update. I think you're right, if you are not building a server farm they
> really don't care about you.

The only real knock I have against VirtualBox is that its 
start-things-on-boot facilities are a bit lacking. There's some script 
out there some guy wrote that does it, iirc., but nothing official or 
integrated. I seem to recall setting up bridged networking was 
non-trivial too.

> Any time you have a product you paid for, and find yourself running a free
> alternative, something is wrong (with the commercial product, that is).

:)

> VMs that users can connect to with an RDP client are very nice, and a good way
> to use old hardware. It doesn't take much hardware to display a remote
> desktop, and with gigabit ethernet things move right along. With the
> USB "forwarding" users can then plug a device into the remote client and the
> server can use it just fine, a real benefit that I don't think anyone else
> has.
>
> It's basically "thin client" computing, without a lot of the hassles.

iirc, kvm currently uses vnc, but Real Soon Now, will use the qumranet 
spice stuff, which is (supposed to be) the cat's meow...


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com