Amahi Virtualized

prodriguezii
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby prodriguezii » Wed May 22, 2013 1:40 pm

Bigfoot, do you have any updates regarding your setup? I'm researching the greyhole/proxmox angle before I attempt my migration and was curious what your results were.

Thank you!

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bigfoot65
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby bigfoot65 » Wed May 22, 2013 6:34 pm

I do have some results I can post, but need to formulate them. I can tell you mounting physical drives and using them for Greyhole as worked without issue for me.

Is there anything specific you would like to know?
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prodriguezii
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby prodriguezii » Wed May 22, 2013 8:02 pm

I do have some results I can post, but need to formulate them. I can tell you mounting physical drives and using them for Greyhole as worked without issue for me.

Is there anything specific you would like to know?
I was interested in the process you used for mounting your physical drives to your HDA VM...also if you decided to do a KVM virtualization or an OpenVZ container.

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sgtfoo
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby sgtfoo » Thu May 23, 2013 4:47 am

The nature and design of OpenVZ Containers entails a limitation in that it's not a good format for file-servers, such as Amahi.
You will need to use a KVM host. OpenVZ containers can only have one volume of space assigned at any one time and managing them any way aside from command-line becomes cumbersome.

Adding host drives directly to a VM in Proxmox involves understanding the structure of the folders that Proxmox uses, as well as the command line for QEMU. Proxmox recently updated all the way to version 3.0 RC2 (at time of post) and I will indeed be testing when Amahi7 is released... however I am possibly veering away from using greyhole with what I need my hypervisor machine to do.

A sample of the drive adding command....

Code: Select all

qm set vm101 -sata01 /dev/sdb
- vm101 is the ID of the virtual machine you want to point the drive to
- sata01 identifies the drive once mounted and the protocol for it
- /dev/sdb is the installed but not mounted drive in the proxmox machine.
Once you boot the KVM you add this drive by manually, permanently mounting it to the VM.

..from experience I've found..
Greyhole is definitely handy if you have Amahi running in a tower that exclusively runs Fedora where you may have many many different sized drives, but in a virtualized environment, using Greyhole adds a lot of un-necessary overhead and I/O, and too much I/O on a drive or LVM group will bog down a hypervisor that isn't using iSCSI for the drive volumes. And using drive images instead would introduce yet another layer of overhead that you don't want, slowing down your file-server and hypervisor.

In many cases, I would suggest that if you're savvy enough, just run Fedora 18 and Amahi 7 in a very robust machine and run Virtualbox or RHEV/libvirt to get virtual machine at the same time.

Oh and to address an earlier post... install with only the OS and LZ drives in the VM, and add greyhole disks only AFTER installation.
Correction: you CAN have live data in the drives you add, but you will need much time to allow for greyhole to re-index and you must have your dashboard match absolutely as it was before.
Last edited by sgtfoo on Thu May 23, 2013 7:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
SgtFoo
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prodriguezii
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby prodriguezii » Thu May 23, 2013 5:25 am

Oh and to address an earlier post... install with only the OS and LZ drives in the VM, and add greyhole disks only AFTER installation. Make sure there's no live data in anything either because moving around files would add another layer of headaches.
I understand installing only the OS and LZ in the VM and adding greyhole disks after install. What do you mean by "no live data in anything"? The only reason I'm even considering adding greyhole to my setup is because I'm using It now and I have live data on my greyhole drives...

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sgtfoo
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby sgtfoo » Thu May 23, 2013 7:59 am

Oh and to address an earlier post... install with only the OS and LZ drives in the VM, and add greyhole disks only AFTER installation. Make sure there's no live data in anything either because moving around files would add another layer of headaches.
I understand installing only the OS and LZ in the VM and adding greyhole disks after install. What do you mean by "no live data in anything"? The only reason I'm even considering adding greyhole to my setup is because I'm using It now and I have live data on my greyhole drives...
sorry, updated my post.
SgtFoo
HDA: VM inside oVirt FX-8300 95w (2 cores for HDA), 32GB RAM (2GB for HDA)
My PC: FX-8300, 16GB RAM, 3x 1TB HDDs, Radeon HD6970 2GB video; Win10 Pro x64
Other: PC, Asus 1215n (LXLE), Debian openZFS server (3x(2x2tb) mirrors)
Modem&Network: Thomson DCM475; Asus RT-AC66U; HP 1800-24G switch

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bigfoot65
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby bigfoot65 » Thu May 23, 2013 8:03 am

It was rather painless for me to convert over to VM. I actually had a Fedora 14 and Ubuntu HDA set up. I was able to only run one at a time due to the physical drive mapping for Greyhole, but that was my intent.

I would use one for a while, then switch to the other. I was undecided which OS I wanted to run, so this is why I chose this path. I am currently running Ubuntu, but if for some reason there is an issue down the road I can switch back to Fedora 14.
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prodriguezii
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby prodriguezii » Thu May 23, 2013 8:22 am

Thank you both very much. I'll try the proxmox route and take notes. I'll try to update the wiki as I redo my setup on a vm.
I'm currently running Ubuntu Server headless with amahi, mythtv backend with MythWeb, deluge, flexget, plex, vnc and other miscellany.

My new proxmox box is much like yours, bigfoot65: Amd Vishera FX-8230 (8 core) on a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 with 16GB RAM. I added a second NIC mostly because proxmox recommends it and because the onboard realtek 8111e has known issues with linux. Been through the gamut trying to get it to work with Proxmox and Ubuntu

I've already installed WHS2011 for PlayOn support on one VM and Ubunu Server on another VM with Amahi setup. I'm going to try the greyhole migration this week (I've got until Monday until the next set of TV shows are set to record).

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sgtfoo
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby sgtfoo » Thu May 23, 2013 9:10 am

I'm updating the wiki for Proxmox greyhole setups....

https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Amahi_ ... ualization...
SgtFoo
HDA: VM inside oVirt FX-8300 95w (2 cores for HDA), 32GB RAM (2GB for HDA)
My PC: FX-8300, 16GB RAM, 3x 1TB HDDs, Radeon HD6970 2GB video; Win10 Pro x64
Other: PC, Asus 1215n (LXLE), Debian openZFS server (3x(2x2tb) mirrors)
Modem&Network: Thomson DCM475; Asus RT-AC66U; HP 1800-24G switch

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bigfoot65
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Re: Amahi Virtualized

Postby bigfoot65 » Mon May 27, 2013 2:02 pm

New version of Proxmox (3.0) appears to have improved speed. It also added some nice features like cloning VM and Create a Template from a VM.

Upgrading is a bit odd as it requires a script be run, but nonetheless it works nicely. Well worth the upgrade for me.
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