Many-monitor workstation accessing multi-monitored VMs

[ebirck]

Hello!

 

So a little background first, I have seen a fair bit of buzz lately about the greatness of unRaid and I am very excited to implement it on a new computer to save me from the simultaneous use of multiple previous ones. I have a sufficiently overkill computer that will be actively running anywhere from 3 to 6 or so VMs. I intend to be managing on average 2-3 of these at a time, and to do so I have a 4 monitor workstation setup (3 across + 1 above). I am hoping to implement the use of a program called Synergy to seamless move between these VMs across monitors, all of which should be nice and dandy. The question arrises from using multiple monitors on each VM (for example let's say I want my windows VM across the bottom three monitors for main work and a linux VM on the upper monitor for some scripting)?

 

I was originally planning to have an army of small video switches (KVM switches without the KM part) and each VM would just have its own dedicated graphics card, but costs start to add up due to A. (video switches for digital signals such as DVI are not cheap) and B. (that many GPUs is a chunk of change on its own). I considered having one main VM connected to all the monitors and just have it use Remote Desktop to connect to the rest, although I don't know of any way to nicely display multiple monitors from the other VMs with that approach and at least two of my VMs need to have the ability to display across the three lower monitors. Does anyone have any suggests? I am open to purchasing 3rd party software if it is worth the cost.

 

And quick follow-up question, I know at least one of the VMs will rarely need a video connection - is it possible to have a VM run without a dedicated graphics processor (discrete or in the CPU, I am running dual Xeons without internal GPUs) and still access it with remote desktop to manage it with a GUI?

 

Thanks! Any advice you can give will be greatly appreciated

[DZMM]

I don't know if this will help, but my smaller setup might help you do it cheaply. 

 

 

Currently I have 2 VMs running on two monitors:

 

 

- VM1 is 'mine' and if VM2 isn't running it uses both monitors

- VM2 'kids' only uses one monitor

 

 

I have them connected like this

 

 

VM1 - Nividia GPU

- Monitor 1 HDMI slot 1

- Monitor 2 DVI

VM2 - ATI

- Monitor 1 HDMI slot 2

 

 

So, I just toggle the input on the monitors if I want to go from dual to single input and vice versa.  When I go to 3 VMs, I'm could do the following if I want three monitors:

 

 

 

VM1 - Nividia GPU

- Monitor 3 HDMI slot 1

VM2 - ATI

- Monitor 1 HDMI slot 2

VM3 - tbc GPU with 2 HDMI

 

- Monitor 1 HDMI slot 1

- Monitor 2 DVI

- Monitor 3 HDMI slot 2

 

 

Remember for each VM if they are running at the same time, you will need a separate keyboard and mouse, or be able to assign a USB hub to each one so you can hot-swap your mouse and keyboard.

[Naldinho]

Hello!

I considered having one main VM connected to all the monitors and just have it use Remote Desktop to connect to the rest, although I don't know of any way to nicely display multiple monitors from the other VMs with that approach and at least two of my VMs need to have the ability to display across the three lower monitors. Does anyone have any suggests? I am open to purchasing 3rd party software if it is worth the cost.

 

It depends on what you are doing with the headless-VMs. There is a limit to the graphic performance of RDP. There is a remote access option that is faster than RDP but I forget the name since I ended up not needing it.

 

Basically if you are just using the other VMs for basic stuff you can run them headless using RDP -- this gives you the option of running them as windows or full screen. Windows 10 has build-in virtual desktops which would allow you to run the VMs full screen and basically have a software version of a video switch. 

 

is it possible to have a VM run without a dedicated graphics processor (discrete or in the CPU, I am running dual Xeons without internal GPUs) and still access it with remote desktop to manage it with a GUI?

 

 

Yes. At the moment I have four Windows VMs and two Linux VMs -- of those only one Windows VM has a graphics card.

 

This is my office setup --

 

Windows 10 VM -- this is the main VM it has a graphics card. There is a second workstation that is a physical machine.

 

One of the Windows VMs is running XP because of a legacy program we need to run that doesn't play nice on newer operating systems. The other VM runs Windows 7 with our website chat backend,  Both of the main computers need access to these so they run as headless VMs. Whenever one of us needs one we click on a RDP short-cut and the VM opens on one of our screens as a Window. They could open up full screen but for our use Window works better since we can continue to work on other stuff on our main computers without giving up too much screen real estate.

 

This works fine because we're doing basic office type stuff on the headless VMs. I highly doubt it would work for streaming video or gaming or anything graphics intensive.