Virtual Machines?

[wdatkinson]

Does anyone have a success story for running a streaming machine virtually?

I was just able to get a stream running from a virtual XP machine running on a Mac Mini via VMWare Fusion. I used a Sennheiser USB audio device to get audio into the machine. So far it seems to run ok. I'm currently listening to NOAA KEC74 via that machine and the audio quality sounds ok. There are a few audible artifacts, no humming, that I believe to be directly related to the virtualization and pass through of audio devices.

[bwstein]

I'd be awfully surprised if you were getting noise or artifacts from the VM. The transfer of information is digital and likely to either be there or not. That said, pauses and breakups seem totally possible if the scheduler is having a hard time getting enough processor cycles to the process.

Ben

[wdatkinson]

Are you running any virtual environments? I was hoping that someone else out there has tried this besides me.

I think the artifacts I heard were more than likely over driving the input.

At any rate, I have the feed machine running on a much beefier machine. Seems to be doing well so far. We'll give it the acid test over the next couple of days.

I've run a variety of virtual environments from Parallels Desktop, Sun's Virtual Box, VMWare Fusion, VMWare ESXI and a monster VMWare ESX farm running ~100 production servers. VMWare ESX and ESXI do not handle USB devices and are way out of scale for this project.

Out of all those, I've settled on Sun's Virtual Box.... For now anyway.

[ffemt601]

I am running xp in Vsphere 4 to host my feed. I have no issues.

[bwstein]

Originally Posted by wdatkinson

Are you running any virtual environments? I was hoping that someone else out there has tried this besides me.

I think the artifacts I heard were more than likely over driving the input.

At any rate, I have the feed machine running on a much beefier machine. Seems to be doing well so far. We'll give it the acid test over the next couple of days.

I've run a variety of virtual environments from Parallels Desktop, Sun's Virtual Box, VMWare Fusion, VMWare ESXI and a monster VMWare ESX farm running ~100 production servers. VMWare ESX and ESXI do not handle USB devices and are way out of scale for this project.

Out of all those, I've settled on Sun's Virtual Box.... For now anyway.

For the feeds I'm running on an older P4 single core machine.

In terms of virtualization experience I run an environment running about 600 virtuals on about 40 physical hosts on ESX.

I'd certainly agree that both in terms of scale and targeting that ESX isn't the route to go. I don't have the experience with Virtual Box to comment on that. I do have an overall question though, what problem are you trying to solve with using any form of virtualization? Given the low hardware requirements of the application and the need to be bound to physical IO I'm not sure what you're gaining in this case using virtualized servers.

Ben

[wdatkinson]

I realize the hardware requirements are extremely low. I was just looking for a different way to do things. Last year, before the market crash, we were looking to sell out home. My "office" had a seven foot high rack full of servers, Cisco hardware (routers, PIX firewalls, switches, etc.). I purchased a large Mac Pro with pretty beefy hardware in hopes to virtualize some of the hardware in my room. When you have to put a window A/C unit in a room to cool the equipment, its a pretty good indicator you have too much equipment!

Anyway, I was just looking for a different way to do things, utilizing existing hardware and not adding any more clutter to my already cluttered room.

After searching these forums and not finding any solid information on virtual attempts, I started this thread in hopes that someone else beside me was doing it, and hoped maybe we could share tricks, secrets, etc.

[bwstein]

Certainly makes sense. I was in part just thinking out loud about what reason someone would have for wanting to use a VM. In my case I was able to do it without adding any hardware just using an existing machine that's also running some home automation stuff. I had to go a similar direction to you with regard to cooling except that it got even a little more out of control for me. I had to upgrade from a 12,000 btu window unit to a 20k unit. Not a good sign about how much crap is stuffed into the room.

Ben