[H-GEN] High End Graphics Support in a Hypervisor/Virtual Server Setup?

[Snowy Angelique Maslov]

Hello all,
We're busy rebuilding our MythTV box at the moment and trying to 
incorporate a virtual server setup for the machine.

This is to allow us to have the 3 Digital Decoders always recording with 
a dedicated server for the MythTV Backend whilst we can change the front 
end to either MythTV (running Mythbuntu) or Windows 7 (For Blueray and 
playing games on the big screen ).

To do this we need a virtualisation package (preferably something we can 
run as a Type 1 Hypervisor). We are looking at either Xen or Vmware ESXi 
at the moment do to this - however we need to know if either of these 
can support a graphics card with full DirectX/Hardware Video 
Decompression? Or if there is another product we should perhaps be 
looking at?   Digging around the proverbial traps proved a nightmare.  
Xen *seems* to suggest it can do this with direct access to the Graphics 
Card but there are no hints on how well this works or if you can easily 
swap between servers.    As for Vmware ESXi I was lost.  I know there is 
some support with VMware workstation but again I no idea how good it is.

The server in question is an AMD Phenom II 955 with currently 4GB of RAM 
and a cheap eVGA card (I think a GT220 - we'll probably upgrade the 
RAM/GPU on it if we can prove this virtualisation concept).

Anyone done this for home yet? I'm used to this stuff for work but it is 
always for servers which don't have a graphic console 90% of the time.

-- 
Snowy Angelique Maslov<snowy at snowy.org>

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