Is XenServer a good base for a HTPC?

20 years ago I had a new cutting edge system every 3 months but lack of money and also the quite decent Pentium 3.2 GHz slimPC I haven't replaced my desktop system for over 3 years...

My Xbox with XBMC is still the centre of my Home Theater together with a 42" plasma and a Yamaha DTS amplifier.

I'm now thinking of building a HTPC but I definitely want it to do more than that. I also want it to run some Virtual machines which are currently running on a 2nd Pentium III system.....

I still don't know which OS I should run as the base system. I could run a desktop Linux with vmware and some virtual machines running win32 and linux the background or a Windows XP/Vista with vmware.

I'm a bit scared this virtualization will make it impossible to use hardware accellerated video hardware.

I recently had my holidays and when I came back at work my colleague showed me 2 Xenservers which replaced 2 vmware-machines. The performance was quite impressive and much faster than vmware. The most impressive part was a live migration: My system was attached to a Virtual Windows XP-machine using RDP. This Virtual machine was then moved from 1 Xenserver to the other Xenserver and you didn't even notice anything in this RDP-session...

Because this HTPC will have the latest technology which is needed for Xenserver I could run that as a base and have the other machines run on top of that....

Is there anyone here using this already or tried it

frater Wrote:The most impressive part was a live migration: My system was attached to a Virtual Windows XP-machine using RDP. This Virtual machine was then moved from 1 Xenserver to the other Xenserver and you didn't even notice anything in this RDP-session...

Haven't tried running Xen on a HTPC, bu the live migration is something Vmware had already 4 years ago (on ESX server), I used it frequently at work.