[jad0083]

This was how I envisioned a centralized XBMC would work in my environment:

File Server (OpenFiler, FreeNAS, UnRAID, or any other NAS) that would provide the actual Videos, Audio, ETC..
another server that has a linux distro that hosts the MySQL database
actual physical boxes with xbmc installed that can see the DB server and have the shared NAS folders Mounted via cifs, nfs, etc...)
gigabit network (affordable intel gb switches and nics nowadays)

And based on the theory above I have my setup like this:

*Server that has Esxi hosting a Server 2008 (DNS, AD,DC), PfSense(dhcp, routing, firewall), UbuntuServer(MySQL, Openfire, Calibre-Server, mumble, minecraft lol)
*Server that has Openfiler(Audio, Video, Pics, UserData, ETC...) serving multiple XFS volumes on several RAID 5s via cifs/smb and nfs

*Now with the setup above, I have my GPO settings to automatically map all the necessary shares from my SAN to any win boxes, so any other box that I add to my environment will automatically see those shares (video, audio, music, etc..)
*I'm pretty sure that you can setup your GPO to push advancedsettings.xml to the client boxes, so it automatically refreshes from a central location as well.

I currently have 2 windows boxes that have XBMC, and all I needed to do with them is modify the advancedsettings.xml to point to MySQL and the thumbnail shares

-=Modified the my.cnf (MySQL settings) and added "skip-name-resolve", solved the initial mysql slowness.=-

Pros:
*Adding new XBMC boxes is easy since it already skips the initial scraping (especially good if you have more than 300+ movies, tv shows, etc...)
*If in an AD environment, login and logoff are WAY faster, since it doesn't have to sync all the user files between the client and server everytime
*Granular modifications on the actual DB (I use Toad for MySQL), if you want/need to.
*Speed: I actually find this faster (but this is my experience), especially if your xbmc boxes are using slow Hdds (IDEs, low rpm drives), since all the streaming will be offloaded to the nic
*Easily more scalable

Cons:
*A little more complicated setup
*Expensive if you're just starting up (great if you already have the existing environment)
*More admin overhead

Im running RC2 btw, no issues so far (crossing fingers)