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Recording Live TV to DrivePool


otispresley

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Hello,

 

I am curious whether anyone is recording live TV to their DrivePool? A little bit about my setup:

  • Server is running Hyper-V Server 2016 Tech Preview 5
  • My controller is a HP RR 2760A
  • DrivePool is running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials VM
  • All disks are passed through to the WS2012E VM
  • All disks are 7200 RPM mechanical
  • I have 3x HDHomeRun CONNECT and NextPVR for live TV

The pool is not good for recording live TV. I can record 1 show fine, maybe 2, but definitely not 3. For this reason, I am currently using a standalone disk passed through for recording and can successfully record 6 shows at once. However, I would very much like to be able to record to the pool. Would creating a 2x SSD Landing Zone with the SSD Optimizer plugin be sufficient for this since the highest level of duplication I have is x2? Does anyone have any experience with it?

 

Thanks!

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I am recording live TV to my pool without issue.  My setup:

 

Host OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with Client Hyper-V running

Recording VM: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit with WMC recording from 2x HDHomeRun CONNECTs

 

I have DrivePool installed on the Host OS, and the VMs are running off pooled/duplicated disks.  I have recorded up to 3 shows at once, and I haven't seen any issues with the recordings.  I'll also be transcoding on the host via Plex at the same time, as all of the recorded TV gets moved from the VM back into the host to be served up to everyone in the house...so I could be working with 5+ read/writes of decent-sized media files at any given time.

 

I know that doesn't help troubleshoot your issue, but the the software is capable...do you have Scanner installed so you can see what the disks are doing?

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Thanks Quinn! I do have Scanner running on the host, and it reports all disks healthy with no SMART issues. I have tried recording to the pool several times over the past year with the same result. The host was originally on Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and the VM was on WS2012E. 

 

I am wondering if it may not be because the driver for my RAID card is running on Hyper-V Server rather than on a full version of Windows Server. The individual drive I am using is not on the same controller as the pooled drives.

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It could be a driver issue on Hyper-V, but it's all essentially the same OS, with different chunks of GUI laid on top.  I could see an issue due to the fact that Hyper-V Server 2016 is still in development, but who knows.  I was wondering if it could have anything to do with the combination of the passthrough drives and DrivePool on the VM...I know the passthrough is supposed to be seamless, but who knows if that combination might create some type of conflict at some point...

 

One thing I might try is to run HDD benchmarks across the different layers and see if a bottleneck becomes evident...on the host against the standalone drive, on the host against a drive on the controller, on the VM against a drive that is passed through but not in the DP pool, on the VM against the DP pool itself...maybe one of those results will point us in the right direction?

 

I was actually planning on building a system similar to yours when I get the time, but I was planning on running Scanner, DrivePool and CrashPlan on the Hyper-V Server, and running multiple VMs on top of all of that...your findings may help me plan my server's future. :)

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A good question: What is the disk queue at when recording?  
Anything higher than 1 per platter is generally undesirable for HDDs.  

 

And you can view this in StableBit Scanner: 

http://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=Disk%20List

(check the 'list Columns" section at the bottom). 

 

 

 

Also, any antivirus, backup or disk tools? 

Any sort of of file system filters can cause issues. 

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Ok, thanks! I will do some testing per feedback. The only thing I have running on Hyper-V that is not default is Scanner. The only  things not default running on the WS2012E VM is DrivePool, Emby, NextPVR, and the HDHomeRun software. The VM has 32 vCPU and dynamic memory running with no limits (The host has 128 GB total) and the VM normally has 10-11 GB in use.

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I would like to thank everyone for the suggestions here. What I ended up doing was the following:

  • Installed Windows Server 2016 Standard bare metal
  • Installed the drivers for the HP RR
  • Installed DP and Scanner
  • Installed the Hyper-V and Essentials roles to get support for VM's and Client Backups again

All seems to be working as expected now. Emby is running on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM and NextPVR on a Windows 8.1 VM. All paths for media, transcoding, timeshifting, and recording pointed to the DrivePool, and it is working great!

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If you have the HyperV and Essentails Experience role installed on the host, DO NOT ENABLE VPN (eg, remote access).  If you do, you will likely see 30+ minute shutdown times, PER VM.  This is normal in this configuration, as it's a "known issue". 

 

I'm not sure if this affects Server 2016, but it has been an issue for Server 2008 - Server 2012R2. 

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I wonder if the latency experienced was due to the drive pass through. Everything I've read about hyper-v 2012 and newer is that drive pass through is slower than using vmdk. Glad it's working out.

 

Sent from my QTAQZ3 using Tapatalk

 

It is very possible, but I had been using pass-through disks for years under both ESXi and then under Hyper-V with no issues until I started trying to record multiple live TV streams at once (only on Hyper-V). All my file transfer speeds from my desktop to the server were always around 112 MB/s, which is about max sans overhead for Gig-E. It would likely have been the same thing transferring multiple files simultaneously, but I rarely ever did that. I was leaning toward drivers under Hyper-V Server because I had just switched to it from ESXi because my HighPoint card was not supported, and I didn't really see any other users here reporting the same issues.

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There is definitely some overhead to the pass-through. 

 

However, as for documentation about it, and pros and cons .... there isn't really a lot of information about it, unfortunately.  The most I can find is in regards to the 2TB limitation, and using disk passthrough to bypass that issue...

 

 

@otispresley, if you were having issues with passthrough, and using a HighPoint card .... I've had a RocketRAID 2720SGL and had a LOT of stability issues with it. It may simply be this card that was the issue, and it wasn't able to keep up with the throughput.

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