3 VMs, 3 Displays (monitors), 1 Kb+Mouse. Possible??

[darkguy2008]

Hello!

 

Long-time lurker here. I've been pondering on the following idea and it seems Unraid could be the solution, but I'd like to know if it really is before I get into this. I've already spent two days on this without avail, and stumbled upon Unraid.

 

So basically I need to do cross-platform development, and dual/triple booting is annoying at best, not to mention the delay it introduces when switching the OSes.

 

My idea is that I can have the VMs running at the same time and then use a hardware KVM switcher to switch the input (keyboard/mouse) and outputs (3 monitors) depending on the OS I need to work on at the time.

 

I've made a working PoC under Linux and QEMU working well, but with a single monitor. Once I add more displays, hell breaks loose. It's just buggy, clunky, the displays don't appear, or get cloned, or have bugs... it's been horrible. So I've heard of PCI Passthrough, but my current hardware is this:

 

• MSI Z97 Gaming 3
• i7 4790K
• 16 GB RAM
• 120GB SSD's, a lot
• DisplayLink UGA-3000 USB to VGA for the 3rd monitor

 

The MSI has 2 PCI-E slots (1 x16, 1 x4 (I think??)), two PCI-E x1, and 3 PCI. I'm thinking I could use the PCI slots to install some USB cards (so I can passthrough them) but how do I do the video part? The only GPU I have is the integrated Intel HD 4000/4400/4500 (not sure) on my CPU. I have another GTX 960 I could install... A 9400 GT and a 6800 GS... I know, old. Would they work?

 

Now, I can't buy any more GPU cards as for now as I'm broke as heck, which is why I need to work on this solution so I can save up time switching between OSes. I'm not actually looking for gaming performance, but I need to run Windows 10 and two other VMs, one is KDE Neon (based on Ubuntu 20.10) and the other is TBD, not sure yet, so I don't mind hw accel on it yet.

 

So the idea is that I can be working on Win10, then push a button on the KVM and switch to Linux, and so on. BUT using my 3 displays. Is this possible? and if so, I'm on the right route? What else would I need?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited January 31, 2021 by darkguy2008
Add hw

[JonathanM]

What you are asking generally requires some pretty stout server grade stuff.

 

Your best bet since you don't really need gaming is to have a single passthrough VM with the two other VM's using VNC as the management interface and nomachine to actually connect and work through the single hardware passthrough VM.

 

Honestly though, 16GB is not going to cut it, you really need more than that for everything to be happy running 3 simultaneous VM's, never mind hardware passthrough.