Virtualisation of my media PCs using ESXi

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nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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Test 3 - USB PCIe passthrough testing

As my motherboard didn't seem to have a USB controller which I could pass through to VM's, I bought one for £6~ off eBay.

Just dropped this in, configured it for pass through, rebooted and allocated it to the Windows 10 VM. Straight away it worked without needing to configure any drivers.

Theres zero noticeable lag between using the keyboard/mouse and the display on the screen. Which is pretty much what I expected but thought it's worth pointing out.

 

nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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Test 4

Had some free time today so figured I'd spend a few hours testing this idea properly. Loaded the machine up with 2x HD6450's, a single HD5450 GPU and the USB3 PCIe card. Connected up 3 TVs (one of which is through a Denon AVR).

Powered the host up and all 3 Windows 10 VMs. Configuration in the photos below is:

  • Left TV: HD5450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM
  • Middle TV: HD6450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM
  • Right TV: HD6450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM (although I did up this to 4 CPU/3GB RAM later when testing Plex)
  • Middle monitor: ESXi host via onboard VGA port

So far so good!



Installed MPC-HC on each of the VMs and loaded up the Avatar Bluray 1:1 rip. Partial success, if you look closely the CPU usage of the two HD6450 based VMs is around 10% but the HD5450 is around 50%. I just can't get DXVA 1 or 2 to work properly on this graphics card when it's virtualised. Either way playback was very smooth, even on fast scenes.

VLC on the other hand seems to crash when I enable DXVA in the settings, otherwise this runs about 50% on all the VMs.



Close ups:

Next step was to test Plex which is my primary interface for playing tv/movies currently. This was a little bit of a pain to test as I have been using Mobile Mouse to control the VMs which as it turns out, you can't press the arrow keys on it to control Plex.

Solution was to open up a remote console on my laptop, set the focus within this and use the laptop keys to control it. Not a long term solution by any means but enough to get the tests complete.



Close ups:


I'd like to point out a few issues I had with Plex that I haven't had before, as two of the graphics cards connected directly to the TVs which I'm assuming don't support DTS audio. Plex was only able to play to these at around 4fps until I disabled the DTS option in the Plex preferences.

Another issue I have had is the VM with the USB3 PCIe card not powering up (no video output, no remote control output past VMWares post screen). This wouldn't happen every time and only happened once I installed a 3rd graphics card into the setup.

Overall I'm very happy how this has turned out, still wan't to test this USB PCIe issue some more before committing to using this in my setup.
 
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ekke

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Nov 16, 2015
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As for controll over the player why dont you use kodi with external codec and an app on your phone like yatzi or the officiall app?
 
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nry

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Feb 22, 2013
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As for controll over the player why dont you use kodi with external codec and an app on your phone like yatzi or the officiall app?
I have tried Kodi a few times, it always feel like a huge hassle to setup. Plex, it just works... besides the odd issue with TrueHD audio I can't fault it!
 

ekke

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Nov 16, 2015
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I have tried Kodi a few times, it always feel like a huge hassle to setup. Plex, it just works... besides the odd issue with TrueHD audio I can't fault it!
What are you setting up and what type of files are you playing?
 

nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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99% of the time it's MKV.

Setting up Kodi, it's the audio config, TV/Movie config (with no central place to edit content), scraping never seems to work, updates fix one thing and break another. The list goes on, just not a fan.
 

ekke

Member
Nov 16, 2015
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99% of the time it's MKV.

Setting up Kodi, it's the audio config, TV/Movie config (with no central place to edit content), scraping never seems to work, updates fix one thing and break another. The list goes on, just not a fan.
Okay, I have never setup up anything fancy audio wise, just using DD mostly. Imagewise I recommend madVR for the best Q you can get!

HOW TO - Launch MPC-HC/MPC-BE with madVR as an External Player
 

nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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Completed Build

Thought I should post the finished result since I found some time to complete it.

Final spec has been updated in the original post.

Had quite a few issues with the boot up due to the 10GbE NIC, then remembered that the Intel X520-DA2 cards did not play well with my C602 chipset so figured this was suffering the same issue. Bit of electrical tape over PCIe pins 5 and 6 to disable the SMBus and all works perfectly.



Internals



Another view



Rear ports, note the VGA port not attached is because I don't have a PCI bracket but once I attach the KVM adapter it's fairly secure.



And finally in it's new home (the 3rd system from the bottom with 5 blue handled drive bays)

 

Baris

New Member
Jul 29, 2018
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hey

I also have a mainboard from Asus Z9PE-D8 WS and I want to install the ESXi.

Can you tell me where I can download the image or where can I find it?

System spec:

upload_2018-7-29_22-26-45.png
32 GB RAM
 

Jemplayer

New Member
Jun 25, 2016
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Gulf of Mexico
Why not just use plex like I do? I have my esxi server running a windows 10 VM just for plex and it works great.

I did set the machine up to eventually pass through a video card to run games and stream it using my steam link for living room gaming when I get a new card for my main machine.