The Great Rebuild

So right now my whole-house media infrastructure comprises;

• Windows 8 Quad-Core PC running MediaPortal TV server & client (lounge)
• Windows 8 Celeron based MediaPortal client (living room)
• Windows 7 i3 based MediaPortal client (home theatre)
• Dual Xeon based unRAID NAS

A good deal of bedding in has taken place and I really like MediaPortal. It gives me multiple terrestrial and satellite tuners as well as access to all my media in a single UI.

I don't like running this many computers though, and the virtualization discussions over on the unRAID forums have really got me hankering for an all-in-one solution.

So, I've purchased and assembled the following hardware with a view to consolidating some of the above machines;

• Gigabyte SKT-AM3+ 990FXA-UD5 Motherboard
• AMD FX8320 Black Edition 8 Core (3.5/4.0GHz, 8MB Level 3 Cache, 8MB Level 2 Cache, Socket AM3+, 125W, Retail Boxed)
• Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 CPU Cooler
• Asus ATI Radeon HD 5450 Silent Graphics Card (1GB, DDR3, PCI-Express)
• Corsair CP-9020054-UK RM Series RM650 80 Plus Gold 650W ATX/EPS Fully Modular Power Supply Unit

There's a push at the moment to get unRAID running on a modern Linux distro with full VM support (XEN and KVM). There are solutions that see it running in a VM but the idea of unRAID in dom0 appeals as there's no need to hardware passthrough of hard drive controllers.

Therefore, this new machine will run;

• unRAID in host Linux (arch, openSuSe, whatever results from the current discussions)
• Media Portal TV Server in Windows 7 VM
• Media Portal client in Windows 8 VM (lounge)
• Media Portal client in Windows 8 VM (living room)

That will free up my celeron client machine for use elsewhere and allow me donate the current MediaServer8 machine to my son for gaming.

This looks like it's going to be a complex project that requires passthrough of TV tuners, 2x graphics cards, onboard SATA and USB devices to multiple VMs (not simultaneously, obviously).

I'll be logging progress here. Wish me luck!