LinuxMCE and VMWare

[CRidge]

Hi!

I'm about to jump into the world of LinuxMCE head first I have quite a bit of computer knowledge, but would like to have someone who know LinuxMCE well (and using this with VMWare) to comment on my plans before I start using $1000's on hardware. Here's what I hope to do:

Buy a powerful PC with Quad CPU, 8 GB RAM, 3 TB HD in raid, BluRay drive, a cable tuner, a powerful graphics card and a decent sound card.

On this PC I plan to install a lightweight Linux to run VMWare upon. I want to have three VMs running: One LinuxMCE Hybrid, one Window Server (web server, database etc. - yes, I'm a programmer ) and one Windows XP (my day to day PC - for gaming and programming and surfing and what have you).

In time I will have a projector (plus plus) in the same room as this PC will be, hence the Hybrid. I also have some questions regaring the media director, but I'll save that for another post ;-)

I also have a digital cable box I want to use. What hardware is best for getting the input from the cable box into LinuxMCE? Can I watch the digital signal while recording through the analog cable tuner?

Is this plan doable? Will I be able to use the graphics card to output LinuxMCE-signals to my projector from one VM while displaying my Windows screen on a display through another - or do I need two graphics cards to make this work? How about sound - do I need two sound cards as well? Anything else I need to be aware of?

Hope someone can help me out - I would really like to make this work :-)

CRidge

[niz23]

CRidge.

Hi!

I'm about to jump into the world of LinuxMCE head first I have quite a bit of computer knowledge, but would like to have someone who know LinuxMCE well (and using this with VMWare) to comment on my plans before I start using $1000's on hardware. Here's what I hope to do:

Buy a powerful PC with Quad CPU, 8 GB RAM, 3 TB HD in raid, BluRay drive, a cable tuner, a powerful graphics card and a decent sound card.

On this PC I plan to install a lightweight Linux to run VMWare upon. I want to have three VMs running: One LinuxMCE Hybrid, one Window Server (web server, database etc. - yes, I'm a programmer ) and one Windows XP (my day to day PC - for gaming and programming and surfing and what have you).

In time I will have a projector (plus plus) in the same room as this PC will be, hence the Hybrid. I also have some questions regaring the media director, but I'll save that for another post ;-)

I also have a digital cable box I want to use. What hardware is best for getting the input from the cable box into LinuxMCE? Can I watch the digital signal while recording through the analog cable tuner?

Is this plan doable? Will I be able to use the graphics card to output LinuxMCE-signals to my projector from one VM while displaying my Windows screen on a display through another - or do I need two graphics cards to make this work? How about sound - do I need two sound cards as well? Anything else I need to be aware of?

Hope someone can help me out - I would really like to make this work :-)

CRidge

This is not a solution for you.
A virtual machine do not have a virtual graphics adapter that is powerful(yet!) enough to output video from a vm through to the console in your host os.
The other solution you mentioned. Using the hosts gpu will not work (yet!).
At this time only Vmware Fusion (for Mac) can use the hosts, gpu driver to achieve hardware video acceleration.

For a production system. Install lmce on its own hardware.

Just my two cents.

/niz23

[tkmedia]

I agree with niz

In addition bluray support under linux  is not really mature and is limited at best.

HTH

[CRidge]

Thanks niz23 and tkmedia.

I was afraid of the fact that this wouldn't work. I was hoping to avoid buying more than one box, but I guess I'll have to get at least two...

Regarding BluRay and Linux - does that mean that LinuxMCE and BluRay doesn't mix either?

CRidge

[nosebreaker]

Speaking of VMware, there's no reason why I couldn't run some Windows VM's on a core is there?  If I beef it up with CPU and RAM first...

[tschak909]

Sure, but you might want to beef up your I/O as well.

-Thom

[nosebreaker]

Very low usage VM's, one just runs a monitoring program and sends emails if something goes down, the other runs a little application I wrote for my own use.  Thanks though.

[tkmedia]

Thanks niz23 and tkmedia.

I was afraid of the fact that this wouldn't work. I was hoping to avoid buying more than one box, but I guess I'll have to get at least two...

Regarding BluRay and Linux - does that mean that LinuxMCE and BluRay doesn't mix either?

CRidge

Linuxmce is limited by what is supported under linux, so you are correct.

[niz23]

That would work.
As TSCHAK said. You need good IO for that to work reliably.

Consider what can happen if you watch a TV and suddenly one of your VMs start doing heavy disk IO.
You would want a separate disk or a good raid system if you want to store VMd on the same disks as you store your media.
Same thing apply for network, but unless you wont do any heavy networking from your VMs you can share them with your core.

/niz23

[colinjones]

Depending on exactly which version of VMWare you are talking about, it has plenty of QoS features for the main parameters like disk IO, memory, CPU and network IO which will allow you to partition off and protect minimum guarantees of each resource so that one VM cannot starve another. In ESX you can even great Resource Pools that allow you to apply policies across these groups for even more control....

[bob1212]

I have almost the exact same question as the OP, but I only want to run the core in a VM, not a hybrid.  I was planning on getting video input with a USB HD OTA tuner device (I haven't looked yet but I think there are linux compatible ones and am aware of that limitation.)  I plan to use VMware server 2, which has support for USB 2.0 high speed.  Does anybody have any experience with this or see any obvious problems?  OP, did you end up setting something similar up?

[tkmedia]

You can use the hdhomerun network tuner.

I do a lot of testing under esxi  but you  want real hw for production



Tim

[roberto99]

I got a core running in a vm in vmware server 2 on xp host and have had no problem streaming videos and music and also using the usb bluetooth connection from the host and more
Its great for testing, especially if your not experienced with linux, as in my case.
Also I am setting up vm's on my physical hybrid, and it generally looks good up to now
cheers

I am just frustrated that i could not install lmce 64bit edition on my phisical hybrid to use more RAM

Roberto

[dlewis]

I got a core running in a vm in vmware server 2 on xp host and have had no problem streaming videos and music and also using the usb bluetooth connection from the host and more
Its great for testing, especially if your not experienced with linux, as in my case.
Also I am setting up vm's on my physical hybrid, and it generally looks good up to now
cheers

I am just frustrated that i could not install lmce 64bit edition on my phisical hybrid to use more RAM

Roberto

Was it straight forward? Set up a wiki on this... I'd be interested in seeing how you got this working well...

[MarcoZan]

I got a core running in a vm in vmware server 2 on xp host and have had no problem streaming videos and music and also using the usb bluetooth connection from the host and more
Its great for testing, especially if your not experienced with linux, as in my case.
Also I am setting up vm's on my physical hybrid, and it generally looks good up to now
cheers

I am just frustrated that i could not install lmce 64bit edition on my phisical hybrid to use more RAM

Roberto

Was it straight forward? Set up a wiki on this... I'd be interested in seeing how you got this working well...

Another question: which version did you install on vmware? 8.10 or plain 7.10?

Thanks and regards
Marco