TV server on VMware ESXi 4.1 (1 Viewer)

[hookx]

AW: TV server on VMware ESXi 4.1

Ok, with one PCI Card and an additional USB-TV-Card it works.
But atm the USB-Card is stuttering. I don't know yet if it's the card (Cinergy S2 USB) or just problems with USB mapping.
I will report...

 

[ltb76]

Hi All,

I got the TV server working on a ESXi 5 host.
I use a PCIe tuner solution from Digital Devices (1x Octopus Bridge + 2x DuoFlex CT) That gives me 4 DVB-C tuners.
I have tested recording 2 channels + watching 2 different channels from 2 clients, and that works without any issue.
I will add a CI and do some more testing but for now I looks promising.

Cheers,

 

[marcB]

AW: TV server on VMware ESXi 4.1

Hi Folks,

just to let you know:
Got TV-Server running with Vista on ESXi5 (among serveral other like mailserver and firewall)
As I had allways trouble with ESXi and VT-d (IOMMU) I use only USB-Devices..
(have a look at VMware Communities: VT-D enabled + RAID-Controller... )

Used Hardware: Intel i5 Mobile on an Advantech AIMB-270G2
connectet to an Open-E.lite NAS (iSCSI) (running on an other Intel Core2Duo Mobile with 4x2.5" SATA 24/7)
I did large number of testes for the nas using Solaris12 with zfs, FreeNas and Open-E.
Open-E works best for my needs (For free if less then 2TB). Solaris needs to much CPU-Power for ZFS and
starts stuttering after filling its cache. FreeNas was quite unstable

Got also two different USB-S2 Tuners for testing.
Technisat Skystar USB2 HD CI works fine: Recording and Live TV, Recording and watching an other video...
Hauppauge WinTV Nova HD USB did not work at all: Live TV gives only some pictures every few seconds.

obviously even the Driver/Tuner stuff makes the difference for success or fail !!!

By the Way: powerconsumption is less than 80W for both server


Have a good time!

Marc

 

[VirtualMP]

XEN was my first choice since it supports Graphics passthru where ESXi does not (although I have it working its not supported and only AMD drivers work so Nvidia cards are out of the question). I am not experienced enough with Linux to get XEN installed so went back to ESXi, been very stable with both the HTPC front end and the XP TVServer back end not having any problems so far, over 30 days now.

If ESXi stops working with my GPU I will be stuck though so updates are out of the question now! Really wanted 2 Graphics cards on one machine so I can have my 2 HTPC's and a server all in one box but I could not get that to work on ESXI, XEN are working on it I beleive.

Why do you have 2 htpc instances on the same virtual host? do you have 2 tv's in the same room?

No but they are in adjacent rooms and I could send the HDMI via cat6 and USB via cat5 for penies compared to having a second machine switched on 24/7.

I have picked up a second PC for testing, an HP DC7900 E8400 which is fully VT-d compliant for under £100 on ebay. This has a single PCI bridge as per Lyve's machine so all pci cards go to one VM like it or not. You can assign them to different VM's but they wont work. I will get it up to the house and plug the TV ariel in to it to test the 2 TV tunners I have on 1 VM. Only for testing I realise its underpowered as a VM host.

Also working on one more problem. I have now been using this ESXi server/HTPC for months as the main HTPC but I recently fitted my Blu Ray drive. VM's are not HDCP compatible as the VMWare VGA driver cannot be disabled so I used AnyDVD but now PowerDVD wont work after an upgrade, it work on a fresh install but asks to be upgraded then it will no longer work, very frustrating its one problem after another.

EDIT:- further to this I just tried WinDVD and it detects that it is running on a Virtual machine and notifies you it wont run on a virtual machine. I suppose its to be expected both Corel and Cyberlink have to show they are keeping up with anti piracy and in the past virtual hardware has been a way of achieving this (thinking virtual CD drives to get round copied game discs). So in short playing Blu Rays with menu's looks to be a show stopper for a virtualised HTPC.

 

[hookx]

AW: TV server on VMware ESXi 4.1

Hi there,

so now, passthroughing directly the USB3-Controller to my TV-Server, the additional USB-DVB-S2-Card works perfect together with my PCI-DVB-S2-Card.

Greetz

 

[MikeKulls]

Re: AW: TV server on VMware ESXi 4.1

Ok, with one PCI Card and an additional USB-TV-Card it works.
But atm the USB-Card is stuttering. I don't know yet if it's the card (Cinergy S2 USB) or just problems with USB mapping.
I will report...

I have the same issue but don't have the option of Vt-d so can only do USB passthrough. Has anyone managed to get this working? I am using the HP N40L home server, leadtek usb single tv tuner, 8 gigs ram with esxi 5.0 and windows home server 2011. I have switched off any other VMs and switched off junk that was using the CPU in the background (search indexing feature).

 

[Lyve]

Short update:

I never managed to get both PCI DVB cards working with ESXi 4.1. I now try ESXi 5 but at the moment its the same issue: Card 1 gets a signal, card 2 doesn't.

 

[yps007]

Hi there,

for all Interested, on my Server with i860 (vt-d) and Mobo MSI p55 GD65 (vt-d) runs a ESXi 5.1 Hypervisor Sphere for Free. Supported with 8 Cores and 32GB RAM.
VT-D is a must have for PCIPasstrough, my Digital Devices Cine S2 (Version 6.2) is passtrough ready and reachable for one VMWare Client on Server.

I test it out with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 and yaVDR 0.5, my next installation Test is a Mediaportal Server with 1 CPU and 2 GB RAM.
next Time i update with feedback.

cya.
yps

 

[VirtualMP]

Just to update with my 2 DVB PCI cards. 1 Nova-T 500 twin tuner and 1 peak generic twin tuner. I can get both of them to work fully so the issue with 2 DVB tunners not working is not 100% a virtualisation issue. I used my DC7900 (Q45 socket 775) machine to test so video was jerky but fluid enough to be watchable and I could tune and timeshift all 4 tuners at once.

I am interested to see a P55 works with VT-d, I spent a lot of cash on a Q57 board for my 1156 build as I thought it was the only 1156 chipset to work with VT-d. There are a lot more that appear to work though as the X58 is a great VT-d board even though it has no official support for it.

 

[KRA]

I've been playing around with ESXi 5.0 for 3 months now, and can report the following (what I remember)
I have currently following system:
ASUS P8B 4/EL
16 GB ecc ram
Xeon 1230 cpu
Asus PIKE 2008 sas/sata controller
ATi 6450 gfx
Agrippa DD/DTS PCI soundcard
VIA USB/FW PCI controller
Hauppauge 5500 PCIe tuner
Hauppauge Nova HD usb2 tuner
Terretec H7 usb tuner
50GB SSD disk

Running 3 VM:
Openindiana ZFS fileserver (Asus PIKE controller passed through VT-d)
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server (built inn USB controller passed through VT-d)
Win7 Mediaportal/TV-Server (ATi gfx, soundcard, via usb/fw, hauppauge passed through VT-d + 2TB RDM harddisk, also on USB I have connected Terratec H7 tuner, Hauppuage NOVA HD tuner, and MCE reciever)
I've also had several versions of xbmcbuntu and mini-ubuntu running as XBMC frontend with ATi gfx.

Failures so far:
Hauppauge HVR-4000 PCI card did not work, it passed on fine and installed fine but did not tune any channels.
FloppyDTV Firewire, did not install/not detected
WHS2011/Win8CP Catalyst control center failed to start but gfx card did output desktop, did not do extensive testing.

Problems:
USB recievers have some stuttering, don't know if this is bad tuners or Virtual problem (new tuners only tested in different VMs) This may be the VIA controller, so I'm gonna test the built in intel controller when I have time.
Hauppauge 5500 PCIe I havn't had much time to test yet, it tuned DVB-S channels fine, but had issues with playback, have not tested dvb-c part yet.