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

[Snowy Angelique Maslov]

On 26/05/2010 2:46 PM, Snowy Angelique Maslov wrote:
> 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.

Thanks to both James (James C. McPherson <James.C.McPherson at gmail.com>) 
and Nick (Nickolas Kwiatkowski [nickolas at au1.ibm.com]).   Both have 
suggested investigating VirtualBox which apparently has improved its 
Graphics Support considerably in the latest versions.   I'll give this a 
try and update everyone as to results.

-- 

Snowy Angelique Maslov<snowy at snowy.org>

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