Clickview - Virtulise

Hi Guys has anyone got any experience of virtulising clickview. I've run tests on physical hardware and it works fine but using it on a virtual network running on vmware workstation the client fails to connect. I've spoken to clickview support and they don't appear to support the product in the virtual environment as they couldn't get it working either

I'm being pressured to place clickview on our ESXi box and SAN setup by our WAN external contractors. I'd also be interested to know how you virtualise a physical TV card I've tried explaining that the card cant be virtulised as far a I know but they still want me to host clickview virtually .

Anyone got this working in a virtual environment?

Thanks for your help

Kili

If it supports a USB TV tuner you might be able to use one of these.

AnywhereUSB - Network-Attached Hub - USB over IP - Digi International

Oh dear this sounds like a recipe for disaster really.

If you have physical hardware to run it on why are they not happy with that at the end of the day the service they want will be available.

Ben

Does your ESXi host support VT-d? If so, you could use VMDirectPath to make the guest VM see the physical PCI(e) TV tuner.

If your virtulisation platform and hardware supports VT-D you may be able to redirect the tv tuner right to the VM. Given what clickview is I don't see why it should have any real issues being virtualised as long as it has enough CPU and storage speed.

Sounds like a possible solution:

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just bear in mind that VMware will not help with any problems you may encounter.

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and the fact that clickview couldn't get it to work in a virtual environment and therefore I'm guessing is unable to support still makes it risky.

Ben

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Originally Posted by plexer

Oh dear this sounds like a recipe for disaster really.

If you have physical hardware to run it on why are they not happy with that at the end of the day the service they want will be available.

Ben

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Thanks for the replies guys. Plexer I suspect thier trying to ties us in to thier services and make us wholly dependent on them as running an ESXi environment with Veam is not as straight forward as using physical servers. They have been pushing us towards virtual servers for some time now. I'm old school and prefer to use physical hardware for such a small amount of servers ( We have 5). Our education IT dept is full of ex teachers and salesman who know nothing about networks and are sold anything and everything very easily.

There's nothing wrong with virtualisation in the right environment but this appears to be an attempt to tie us into the current contractor in the long term. Over the summer holidays our servers were virtulised and we were expected to return and get on with it no training in ESXi or Veeam. Rather ironic really an education dept that dosent offer training to its IT staff.

Kili

What is your clickview enviroment? We have the clickview server running on a virtual server with all clients that are thin clients connecting to it. The database is on a NetApp filer with the clickview server pointing to it.

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Originally Posted by AlexPilot

What is your clickview enviroment? We have the clickview server running on a virtual server with all clients that are thin clients connecting to it. The database is on a NetApp filer with the clickview server pointing to it.

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We have to ESXi boxes one's a failover for the other and there both running on HP hardware with SAN to host the vmdk files and data. All computers are standard Dell Optiplex 380

Kili, what errors do you receive exactly? I spoke to ClickView earlier on regarding an unrelated matter and mentioned this thread to them and they said they was not aware of either this thread or the specific issue you are referring to. Who did you speak to at ClickView? I think they were keen to hear from you again regarding the matter. Have you got their contact details?

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Originally Posted by Phantom

Kili, what errors do you receive exactly? I spoke to ClickView earlier on regarding an unrelated matter and mentioned this thread to them and they said they was not aware of either this thread or the specific issue you are referring to. Who did you speak to at ClickView? I think they were keen to hear from you again regarding the matter. Have you got their contact details?

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I also spoke to them this morning and after discussion they advise they support clickview server on a virtual server but not THE CLIENT on a virtual desktop. So when I originally called I was testing clickview on VMWare workstation 7 on a virtual windows 2003 server and virtual XP desktop hence I could not get the client to connect. As we have physical desktops it shouldent be a problem.

They also advised that the a TV card can be hosted on a physical desktop and the recorded file then uploaded to the clickview server so it looks like we will virtulise our clickview server after all.

Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions