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The Virtual Media Center: Hardware

In continuing to document my virtual environment, I’ve decided to outline the hardware I’m using since it was the first question a friend asked. So here’s a quick breakdown of all the components, and some general comments about them second.  Bare in mind, most of the components are couple years old now, but the machine, despite my harsh treatment has held up remarkably well.

The components:

The machine was technically a rebuild that started in 2012, and as my primary PC for 3 years, it served me well.

The Asus M5A99FX is a solid motherboard, providing a USB 3.0 as well enough SATA connections to meet my needs.   If I were to build a newer version of an AMD system for this purpose, I would consider something similar, but a little newer of course.

The AMD FX8320 is also a solid performer, I had it overclocked at 4.2Ghz the majority of the time I was using as a desktop, and that included a brutal 24/7 regimen of muxing, transcoding, and gaming activity, and it was always on so that it could record my shows for my family.   FWIW, to keep it nice and cool while beating the heck out of it, I have a Cooler Master Hyper T4 cooler on it, a great upgrade from a stock cooler.

The Ballistix memory is pretty run of the mill variety memory, though again, a solid performer, no major concerns there.

The power supply from Cooler Master has been a great investment.  Prior to making the switch to this fully modular PSU, I didn’t really pay much attention to where cables where run in my case since I never saw them anyway.  However, with the modular cables combined with the CM Force case, I have cables run nicely out of the way allowing for maximum airflow.  At first this doesn’t seem relevant, but the cpu temperature dropped  5°C which is pretty significant.

*Technically, I have the V700, which is a little harder to find these days, but they are in many respects the same PSU.

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My Adventure in Building a Virtual Media Center

Over the last few months, I’ve been having more and more difficulty with a computer that I built several years ago as a Media Center PC.  It’s become unstable for various reasons including failing drives, software installation and removal, upgrades, etc..  This has left me with a semi-usable machine, that ultimately isn’t reliable enough to set a program to record, and expect it to be available.  To exacerbate the situation, I have hours and hours of favorite shows and movies that are marked as Copy-Once protected.  While I support the rights of content producers and Digital Rights Management, it can be annoying when you lose entire seasons of your favorite shows.  Copyright issues put aside, I want a reliable way to continue to use Windows Media Center, despite the fact that for the moment, Microsoft appears to be abandoning it.

First things first.  I opted to build my VM Lab using VMware 6.0, installing it on the existing hardware.   Originally, I tried using the standard image from VMware, however, like many others using older hardware, I ran into driver problems.  So I did some digging and discovered ESXi-Customizer-PS Script, and opted to follow the instructions available in this video on YouTube.  Long story short, this allows you to built a custom ISO image adding drivers for older hardware.

Following the creation of my custom ISO image, I needed a way to install it on the hardware, and for this I used an  inexpensive USB stick (Lexar 8GB) along with Rufus 2.10, created my bootable flash drive.  Instructions on using Rufus for this exact purpose can be seen on youtube.

Now that I have VMware up and running my next step is to run through the creation of a fresh new VM.  If all goes well, I may even attempt a Physical to Virtual conversion, but let’s not get too far ahead…