Does anyone run Roon Core and Bridge as a Virtual Machine?
The use case: Multi-room Audio. Here is one machine running, both, Roon Core and a number of Roon Bridges. The Bridges connect to hardware USB ports or hardware sound cards. The output goes to the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) of choice. The DAC’s analog outputs plug into a multizone amplifier.
What are the benefits and drawbacks here?
Thank you.
I run ROCK in a VM using ESXi as hypervisor. No drawback. All my endpoints are in the room where the sound happens across hardwired ethernet.
I think the drawback of running in the configuration you’ve identified is you won’t have the cleanest path from bridge to DAC to amp resulting in reduced SQ. Maybe that doesn’t matter in your multi-room setup. But a hypervisor running multiple VMs is just generally going to be noisy. The USB bus will be noisy. It’s the wrong place to start for excellent sound quality. Could you actually here the difference? If you were using lower end ceiling speakers with no attention to imaging then no. If you’ll be using that set-up for a reference listening sweat spot then absolutely. Of course, nothing stops you from doing a combination of virtual bridges where it doesn’t matter and setting up a much higher quality endpoint where it matters.
I do like this idea though. Been talking to a friend of mine who is building a house and we’ve been discussing possibly using Roon as the source of his whole home system. He’s trying to do it on the cheap so one idea we were playing with was Rasp Pis with amp hats. Looks like we can drop as many Rasp Pis as we need cheaper than a multizone amp.
Anyway, looking forward to hearing more details of your final setup and lessons learned.
Good points. I just don’t have a test method to measure the noise.
I have considered the RPi with HATs. I also considered iOS 11/Android 5+ device as the endpoint.
Using the mobile devices you get a touch screen, battery back up, and good product all in one. Just add a Dragonfly Black an Amp w/ speakers.
Back to the all in one solution, the design aims to have all devices in a rack. A central solution connected to speaker wire and speakers in room has a benefit of reducing the electronic and wiring clutter in each room.
Just curious… what’s the point of running several Roon bridges on the same machine? You can already have several audio devices per machine and link them however you want during setup. For instance I have three DACs connected to my machine where I run core and bridge.
The comment regarding noisy USB port is snake oil, but you will run into issues with latency spikes on a VM on your core and bridge that could cause issues. If you really do want a bunch of bridges just use docker. But I still don’t understand the use case here.
Good question. I realized that, what you mentioned above, last night when I ran Roon from machine that has multiple sound card drivers. They were all presented to me in the audio set-up.
I was thinking in terms of fail-over or failure of an endpoint. If all was virtualized , it would have a redundant VM to keep the music going. Overkill- yes.
I wanted to know if the group found any peculiar advantages.
So, the failover won’t actually be automatic though since Roon bridges require exclusive access to an audio device. Moreover, since each endpoint has its own bridge, it’s actually worse now in that you’ll need to identify and then manually restart one of those bridges.
If you’re running a single bridge eg; as a systemd service, the service will automatically restart for you in less than a second if it does happen to fail. Moroever, by running a single bridge you get much better performance since the CPU scheduler in the kernel is able to better manage vectorized workloads (things like convolutions are vectorized operations that require special CPU instructions that can disrupt other workloads on the VM).
All you’re going to get is increased latency by running a bunch of VMs. In fact, even amazon is going down the route of providing bare metal instances (or using very low level hypervisors that provide exclusive hardware access) due to the disadvantages of VMs.
If you do want multiple running bridges for whatever reason then use docker. There’s no virtualization overhead and the network hit is very minimal (order of microseconds).
Very insightful. Thank you.
Based on your feedback. I’ll consider running a Windows Guest with Roon Core and have a separate hardware machine (RPi/Windows Bridge) with 3 DACs/outputs going into a multizone amp combination.
And for what it’s worth, you’ll also get far better performance running the core in Linux from what I’ve seen. It’s much lighter weight.
Cool. I’ll give it a go!
I run Roon core in a Linux 18.04 container on Proxmox VE - open source and awesome. Proxmox hosts a bunch of other containers including my Plex server etc. and it is rock solid. It is sitting on an old ex-Lease Dell 9020 desktop that I picked up for a few hundred $ and sits in the basement. I never need to touch it as it is all administered via the Proxmox Web GUI from any device on my LAN. My library is on a Synology NAS connected to the Host with gig LAN.
I’ve had no latency issues at all controlling/syncing 5 Roon end points with MQA/high res audio, some of which are wireless - so I’m not convinced latency is a concern.
The main advantage of running things this way for me is, in addition to having Roon on a dedicated always on platform, that it is incredibly easy to administer/change/upgrade/restore - ideal if you are a tinkerer.
It’s great.
Cheers, Graham. Running Roon on Ubuntu 18.04 – machine serves Plex, Roon, family file server. Stuffed up my Roon extensions a while back, and the idea of rebuilding the whole machine is painful. What you’re describing sounds ideal. Appreciate the pointer.
Yeah it works well. The key is to have only one service per container e.g. Plex or Roon or… then each service effectively has it’s own virtual machine so rebuilding/changing becomes really fast and simple. The containers act like completely independent Linux machines but share low level resources so you can easily have multiple running on a moderately specced PC running Proxmox. Also, run the containers without GUI - i.e. Ubuntu server as this keeps the resource use way down.
Sweet, thank you. Sounds perfect for what I’m running. Experimenting to come.
Hey there, I run Roon Core in a VM on ESXi but I’d like to use Roon Rock instead. How dod you get that image to boot? what steps did you take?
It has been over a year and, knock on wood, it’s still going strong so I’ve not had to repeat the procedure which is really good because I’ve lost my notes. So… from memory…
I could never get it to install in ESXi. I tried all the tricks I could find for attaching a physical keyboard to the VM in order to get past the “press key to continue” but nothing worked. Plan B was to use VMWare Fusion to do the install.
VMWare Fusion allowed me to complete the install without any issue. I think exported the Fusion VM to OVA and this gave me a compatible disk image which I imported into ESXi. That is how I was able to get ROCK booted under ESXi. I just don’t remember the specific steps I used. All of my music is stored on an external USB drive. I did it this way so that I could have physical access to the drive if needed for back-ups and such. The VM is configured to direct attach the drive.
I am also running Roon Server on ESXi. Debian Buster machine.
I also have a ROCK vm, but because is a closed system I don’t like it.
I cannot install, for example, Extension Manager.
I have been running ROCK in a headless Parallels VM (bridged networking with static IP) for about a month now, all good, way better than running server directly in the Mac.
I was going to launch a VM just for extensions but that seemed like a waste of resources so never did it. Finally threw diet-pi on a RaspPi 3B+ and loaded extensions there. That’s been working very fine. I really like the hands-off of ROCK… until I have to troubleshoot something.
I am stuck at missing codecs point. I have raised below support ticket. Any help welcome!
I did not went the Proxmox VE path because it needs a dedicated server or could I install in a virtual machine?
One more vote for Proxmox.
I am running it in not a extremely powerful NUC (dual i3 with 16gb).
I have room server with HQP in one VM plus other VMs and running perfectly well.