March 26, 20188 yr Hi all! A family member of mine, wanted his 3 kids to have a gaming computer each. But then I started wondering. Couldn't he/I in theory, run a unRAID setup, with a dedicated GPU for each VM, a USB PCIe card with individual controllers per port, and then just cable up an HDMI and USB Hub for each room? How would it work, with starting/stopping each VM? Could they do so individually by clicking the keyboard, for example? Or how would you do that? Is the idea just plain stupid, or definitely doable in a usable matter? Thanks alot in advance! Cheers, Jonas
March 26, 20188 yr Yep, that would work, but the cabling might be nasty. I use unRaid all the time for VM's but they are connected via RDP or some other way. Gaming VM's need dedicated graphics hdmi, keyboard, and mouse cabling. RDP VM's work fine on wifi or perfectly with only an Ethernet cable. This cabling is the Achilles problem with gaming VM's. Now if all you need is a lan party environment it's perfect as the cabling is short and doable. But separate bedrooms...... RDP is great for web browsing, MS Office type work, coding etc but high perf gaming needs passed through video cards, and the whole cabling thing. The HDMI and USB hubs help, but it's still a pain. They can reboot their Windows VM's from their room, but overall VM control would be from the unRaid Gui. Likely best to simply leave the VM's always running and only shut the screens down with no activity. Depends if you needed more VM control from each bedroom and wanted to give everybody access to the GUI?
March 26, 20188 yr Community Expert At the cost of GPU's (due to bit coin mining) these days, I would bet that individual preconfigured gaming computers would be cheaper than a three GPU VM setup. And this is not even factoring the costs and headaches with the cabling issues.
March 27, 20188 yr Author Haha, I start to feel that this might be a too exotic setup. I just wanted to try to do something fun with UnRAID, but I damn well ain't gonna run around and play support for them every 10 days. So individual machines is most likely the best way to go. :-)
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