Monday 5 November 2012

Taming the Octopus

Well, Microsoft finally released Windows Media Center for Windows 8 and with it I set about my seeing if I could get TV working on MediaServer and HTPC.

I'm still a little frustrated that I need to maintain the server to manage storage and feed the living room TV while having  a separate machine drive my home theatre.

That being the case, I spent a LOT of time researching Virtualisation and what's possible. It turns out that PCIe passthrough is now possible. With a correctly specified motherboard and cpu (VT-d supported), it's possible to pass PCI and PCIe devices directly to VMs when using Xen or KVM on linux. (no support in Hyper-v on windows yet)

In theory, I could set up 3 or 4 VMs on one box. Two could be media players driving living room and HT via separate video cards. A third could be my unRaid with a multi-channel SATA card passed through for native speed/access and the 4th could be by NZB appliance.

In theory.