New ESXi with XBMC build "Zen"

FWIW I use HP Microservers (N36L) for both my HTPC (OpenElec) and my fileserver (WHS2011) and it doesn't have any issue with FLAC or any other format for that matter. CPU usage is always really low.

I think one of the primary motivators here for the OP was a learning experience and to do something interesting with the technology. Isn't that why we are all here?

 

A new Xeon with 10 machines on a SSD mostly idling on download services, web pages, etc etc draws around 50watts I believe.

 

hey thats fine.. doing it for the sake of hobbyist/education, but he was trying to push a strong argument on page 1/2 that it was a 'sensible' thing to do.

 

I said its less secure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wxtsisTUY

If you impatient go to 38:40 for his conclusion.

 

Cheers for the info. Thought it might be doable, but now I also have the power to load another 8+ VM's of whatever I like without risk of running out of resources which is nice. Also I think PFsense is going to chew a little CPU once I get VLANing and secure encrypted VPN setup.

Thanks, yeah that's it. Learning experience is really good. Even using the whitebox hardware and having the issue I've had always helps improve the old troubleshooting and Googling skills

 

I think it is 'sensible' in this day and age. It would generally be $350-400 for a 'standard' htpc. Mine was $750, which although more expensive will provide me with substantially more power and scalability to create a htpc, file server, app server, full routing solution, testing base for any other OS's or builds, snapshotting, templating and educational experience.

And it all runs VERY low power usage ~65watt idle I believe. Also my App server runs sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato, these 'manage' all of my tv shows and as such needs to be on all the time anyway, I'm happy with that. Have always kept one pc in the house on for those sort of functions.

I can't see how all of those advantages don't make this a viable solution for more people. I understand the system is more powerful then what would be required if I was just running htpc, file server but surely what is providing is leaps and bounds ahead of a 'standard' htpc.

 

I do appreciate DropBears point that splitting the Windows images into File server, apps and mgmt is overkill. I've got SAB, Sickbeard, CouchPotato along with a heap of other apps all running on my file server.

 

Yeah I can see that it may not be 'necessary'. But the last thing I would want would be to break my file server while mucking around with other apps (especially those one's which can be a bit fiddly). To be able to snapshot, restore and manage that server independently and know it's not going to touch your file server setup is nice.

And I have the grunt so why not. Takes ~5mins to install and setup another Win 2012 server.

 

You should setup a wiki that way you not afraid of your fragile setup. This would be a better learning experience.

I always teach my grads the importance of documenting and rtfm before everything else.

 

Agreed. I have my oldish (Xeon x3360 quad, x38 board, 8gb ram) server running deduplication on my storage array (~12tb), sab, sickbeard, couch potato, my movies for metadata fetching and media center database backend, file serving, utorrent webui, dhcp, dns, AD, as well as Centos 6 in a VM (Hyper-V) running PIAF asterisk PBX. Has never skipped a beat. Upgraded it to Server 2012 a few months ago, upgrade went smoothly (to my surprise).

If anyone's wondering, I'm using my Dreamspark Server 2012 licence. pretty good for free!

 

The more interesting vulns of late have been the cipher key stolen from one VM to another on EC2s Xen's farm in Nov and the source for an older version of ESX being leaked... That's proper scary. I'm not familiar with the jailed services u speak of though Xen and VMware seem to be everywhere in big business, therefore present a more lucrative target to attack.
For the time being, VM breakouts seem relegated to the academic community and aren't being conjured up in Russian basements and sold on forums as readily as browser hijacks etc... I'm guessing.
That and the fact the biggest players in any game can afford to pay the brightest minds to help harden, sprinkle some "who's going to to waste the exclusivity of a zero day, haxing my goat pron when they could hit some massive organization" mentality then garnish with, "a 10 year old could setup esx vm's" means u have a nice fairly secure time saving setup if the goal is to run stable services plus be able to bang templates up in seconds to only throw away 15m later, all with leveraging off prior knowledge.

*wonders off to read up on this jails business*

 

UPDATE:

So after a VERY flaky couple of months... I've got everything setup again. Had some issues with the Intel motherboard as stated which died after ~10days use. Got a replacement, newer version, latest bios. Reloaded all again and was running really well... for ~10days... then died again in the same manner.... arrrrgggggg

Took it back to get refund this time (still waiting) bought a 'proper' board now. Supermicro X9SCM-F. Microatx, support the ivy brudge xeon cpu's. Supported NIC (and a 2nd with a driver install after initial esxi install).

Cost me an extra ~$150 for the difference in motherboard and having to use ECC ram. But it's certified to work with Esxi so it's just a better option. Still a relatively cheap experiment.

I DID get XBMC vm up and running with video and audio working (couple of small audio glitches) but that was only running for a few days before the thing crashed.

Will be rebuilding XBMC VM, pfsense for routing in the next few days. Only got it all up and running again with the new board last night. Only 2 x 2012 servers (app and file) working so far. will update further with info on the other VM's once I get it all working together happily.