roussell
Active Member
I saw in a post from Dan that ESXi (4.0 I'm assuming) supports PCI and USB passthrough. Is this only with certain motherboards? I tried ESXi and could never get USB passthough to work. My other problem was that there was no management utility for the Mac platform. To administer the box I'd have to load another virtual XP session on my Macbook just to run the vSphere client.
I ended up creating my own psuedo-baremetal hypervisor of sorts. I created a very minimal install of Debian Linux with a Blackbox window manager and Sun's VirtualBox. I load each VM in a different desktop on startup and the host OS does nothing but manage the VMs, the drives (using LVM) and act as a VNC host. From my Macbooks or anything else I can administer the host box and any of the virtuals through a VNC session.
The box is an HP that has a quad-core Intel 8200, 6 SATA ports, and 8GB of RAM. Currently I have 3 terabytes of storage split between 5 virtual machines. Even though the 8200 doesn't have VT built in - I see no performance hits when running 32 bit guests (obviously 64bit guests aren't possible without VT, but that doesn't affect me.)
1 Homeserver Linux VM that acts as network storage for media and a Time Machine backup for the Apples.
1 HouseBot XP machine that is the primary HA machine. I use usb-serial adapters and a Quatech box.
1 Linux server that compliments the Housebot server by running OWFS, LaCrosse weather station apps, and other misc. things that feed HouseBot
1 HA playground XP VM - currently has Homeseer eval, Premise, and J9AE on it. This is where I test out other stuff. It gets re-created every so-often.
1 XP development VM. This has Visual Studio, another copy of HouseBot (for dev) and other tools needed for HA development on it. Things are created and tested here before they make it to the 'production' box.
VirtualBox is nice because it seems to use very little overhead, there are also several tools available for managing you VMs and drives. There is now the ability to take a snapshot and turn it into a new, separate VM. I keep a Linux and XP default install ready for when I need a new 'box'.
So, what is everyone else doing with their virtual installs?
Terry
I ended up creating my own psuedo-baremetal hypervisor of sorts. I created a very minimal install of Debian Linux with a Blackbox window manager and Sun's VirtualBox. I load each VM in a different desktop on startup and the host OS does nothing but manage the VMs, the drives (using LVM) and act as a VNC host. From my Macbooks or anything else I can administer the host box and any of the virtuals through a VNC session.
The box is an HP that has a quad-core Intel 8200, 6 SATA ports, and 8GB of RAM. Currently I have 3 terabytes of storage split between 5 virtual machines. Even though the 8200 doesn't have VT built in - I see no performance hits when running 32 bit guests (obviously 64bit guests aren't possible without VT, but that doesn't affect me.)
1 Homeserver Linux VM that acts as network storage for media and a Time Machine backup for the Apples.
1 HouseBot XP machine that is the primary HA machine. I use usb-serial adapters and a Quatech box.
1 Linux server that compliments the Housebot server by running OWFS, LaCrosse weather station apps, and other misc. things that feed HouseBot
1 HA playground XP VM - currently has Homeseer eval, Premise, and J9AE on it. This is where I test out other stuff. It gets re-created every so-often.
1 XP development VM. This has Visual Studio, another copy of HouseBot (for dev) and other tools needed for HA development on it. Things are created and tested here before they make it to the 'production' box.
VirtualBox is nice because it seems to use very little overhead, there are also several tools available for managing you VMs and drives. There is now the ability to take a snapshot and turn it into a new, separate VM. I keep a Linux and XP default install ready for when I need a new 'box'.
So, what is everyone else doing with their virtual installs?
Terry