[mythtv-users] VMWare on the backend. Viable solution?

[Christian Szpilfogel]

Martin Ravell wrote:
> It seems that VMWare ESXi supports PCI Passthrough. Have not been able 
> to confirm VMWare Server. My original plan was a CentOS Host running 
> several VMWare virtual machines using VMWare Server. The Myth backend 
> being one of them. I’ll post this info here as well when I get hold of 
> it.
>
> ...
>
> I’d rather not setup a slave Mythbackend on the host itself. This 
> strikes me as a bit messy and overcomplicated. If I were to go towards 
> this route it would strike me that having the Host itself as the 
> Mythbackend server would be better. I do like the management, backup, 
> snapshot etc banefits of having the Mythbackend as a VMWare client though.
>
>
setting up a slave backend is pretty straight forward (compared to a 
master) and if you are running CentOS then you can get the minimal set 
of RPMs that you need for mythbackend, mythtv-setup, and if needed the 
ivtv drivers. Also note a Slave is almost stateless so it has little 
need to be backed up. I did it this way and then my Virtualized MBE was 
a canned myth distro (Knoppmyth at the time) which made the VM 
effectively a real appliance that had everything preconfigured. I also 
offloaded the trans-coding to the slave on the host which could make use 
of the multiple cores.

However, if you can just as easily import your tuner to the guest than 
go for it.

Another consideration is trans-coding in a guest. I had not done this 
until recently and I'm finding that transcoding h.264 for say commercial 
skip and mp4 conversion is a bit taxing on the guest. So I may create a 
slave or two just to offload those tasks into another guest and thus 
better utilize my cores.