Merits of running Squeezebox Server on a virtual machine

[Hercules]

Hi,

I'm planning to buy/build a home server, and am considering the merits of running Squeezebox Server on a VM. I'd be grateful for your opinions.

At the moment my Squeezebox Server runs off a spare laptop, but I now need to use that laptop (because my main laptop has died), and so want to use this opportunity to get Squeezebox Server running on something a bit more solid and scalable.

I'm thinking the home server will do the following:
- Act as my primary file store
- Act as my backup (I know it should be separate but that's a later step...)
- Host my lossless music library for my Squeezebox
- Host Squeezebox Server
- Host a duplicate lossy music library for my portable player
- Maybe also do some other media sharing (e.g. additional music sharing, video, etc.)

So I'm wondering whether there is any value in running Squeezebox Server on a VM. Being a bit of a geek the idea appeals to me but are there any significant benefits in doing so?

[aubuti]

If I understand you correctly, you are getting a new computer to run SBS and do those other tasks, and you want to know about the merits of doing that on a VM on the new computer? If that's right, then the first question is what will the non-VM (ie, the real/host machine) be doing? Unless you'll be doing something different with that, I don't see any reason to run SBS on a VM. You would just be dividing up computing resources when you don't need to.

That said, I have found VMs useful for SBS. I often use beta versions of the server software, but my family doesn't want to be beta testers. So I run the current stable release on the host machine, and the nightly beta on the VM. Then I can connect any of my SBs to either version of SBS.

[sensei451]

Old thread, but anyway.

Runing Hyper-V and a guest windows server 2008 with media server, i have not been able to get a reliable synced playback with 2 duets. I guess the internal clock works differently i guest OS:es.