Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd. - Support Forums and Community

I am considering swapping out my server for a new one. I currently run WHS v1 as the OS and it also runs CQC as well as use to run SageTV.

While this runs fine, I would like to get stuff running on virtual machines as much as possible. I would like to run WHS v2 as the main OS and then have a virtual machine for CQC, another one for my PIAF phone system (would be a Linux machine), and possibly one other for SageTV should I ever go back to cable.

Early on with virtual machines, I know there where issues with attaching "stuff" to it. Whether it was via USB or a PCI slot, etc. - the older virtualized machines had problems accessing those attached peripherals.

So my questions is can today's virtual machines see PCI slot cards (like my Delta 410 sound card) and USB connected devices (like my Digi Edgeport 416 serial port box)? Are other people using virtual machines to run their CQC setup?

Thanks!

It depends on the platform you run it on. The base platform has to have drivers for it unless it is USB. So if you are talking VMWare ESX then you probably wont' get to use your PCI cards, USB works. VMWare Workstation may be able to detect the PCI card because the base OS is Windows and it would have drivers for it.

I am running on ESXi and have not had any issues with most USB stuff passing through (UIRT, etc). Other stuff like my serial card aren't getting picked up and my USB SD Card reader almost works... I had to load custom kernel drivers to get it to detect the NICs.

Well since most of the hardware is needed for the CQC machine, perhaps it would be better to run CQC on Windows 7 and then run the WHS software on a virtualized machine. All it needs is network access and disk drive space.......

I run CQC on whs2011 without issue.

my master server is running inside of Parallels on my Mac Mini. I have USB->Serial dongles hanging off and it all works OK.

FYI, I am running my master server on a 25GB disk w 1GB of RAM. no issues at all, but I don't have a media repo.

I used to run CQC on a virtual machine but as soon as I mentioned some potential issues with a driver (Lutron RadioRa2), there was immediately some discussion of maybe your virtual machine is causing network or other issues. So then I moved CQC to my WHS 2008 machine, where it continues to run. Guess what, the driver issues were still there after moving to a physical machine but have since been fixed.

So CQC will likely run fine on a virtual machine...just hope you don't have to troubleshoot any issues. For me, I don't want to deal with any of those issues again so I doubt I will go back to a virtual machine for CQC. Annoying though as it would do just fine running virtually.

David

Have been running W2K8 on an ESXi host for three years now with not one issue.

All my serial is via a digi etherlite32

Also run a firewall, UnRaid and Win7 (DMZ).

VM tech is very mature now - give it a go, just make sure you have ram and a processor to support visualization.