February 19, 201214 yr Hey all, So I started out with an unraid server using a sempron 145 CPU. I run 2 xbox 360s in the house and use them as media center extenders. I used the Vbox plugin to fire up a VM on unraid so that I wouldnt have to keep 2 machines in the house running at all times. So what was happening was, when I would play videos on both Xbox's, my CPU would spike at 100% and the videos would skip. So last night I went out and bought an AMD x6....dedicated 4 cores to the VM, and tested again. Now my CPU will hit about 15%...problem solved, right? So this morning I added the lethal weapon bluray set (video sizees about 5GB each) As soon as I start one, it skips. So i come in here and my CPU is at about 60%...which isnt too bad. So now the questions.... one, it doesnt seem like my VM is using these cores very well. My physical box, which has only 2 cores never seemed to spike like this.... two, am I correct in thinking that my CPU should not by my bottleneck here? I have a feeling if I move everything back to a physical box, this issue will go away. But again, I would like to avoid having 2 machines on in the house. (I need one for unraid, and one for the xbox to connect to ) I am using Media Center On a side note... could this have anything to do with the fact that my Virtual Hard Disk is on my unraid array? Would putting it on a dedicated disk help? any ideas?
February 23, 201214 yr Why not run unraid as a hardware box and have virtual box running on it. I am using a core2 duo with 8 gigs of ram. It has 3 VMs, one exchange, one router (untangle), and general xp box. It also runs mysql for xbmc, crashplan, air video for real time transcode, and several other services on it. Videos will even play inside the vm xp box. Network response is good. The only jumping or delays I see is when a software package is i scanning the 1300 movies for fan art and metadate. I use Sage-TV, xbmc and Mymovies on my system. John
March 14, 201214 yr Author yeah thats how its setup.... Virtualbox running on top of unraid. It only doesnt work when I use the Xbox, which connects to the VM
March 20, 201214 yr My untangle and xp virtual machines vmdk's are on the cache drive. My exchange vmdk is on one of the array disks. During startup of the exchange the disk is hammered for read. I start one at a time after a reboot of unraid. My cpu (core 2 duo 2.8 gig) goes to 100 then backs off to normal afterwards. I can watch SD movies on the xp virutal box with decent play back. CPU goes to 100% then. airvideo also causes the CPU to go high as it is doing real time transcoding to the iphone ( no mpeg on iphone ) .
March 29, 201214 yr Author I was able to move my VM to the cache drive. Everything seems well with SD video now. When I try a 5-7GB bluray through, the skipping still happens. Is that your experience as well?
March 29, 201214 yr What are running on the VM that the xbox connects to. My VM is displaying the movie. I am using RDP to connect to virtual box server. I did not even try bluray as it needs hardward decoding for video and the virtual box does not have that. John
March 29, 201214 yr Author VM runs windows 7 ultimate and the Xbox connects as a Media Center Extender
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