Vmware Workstation to UnRaid questions

[Dav3]

Hello,

 

I'm a software developer who has been using Vmware Workstation for many years, mostly for containing install-bloat & to deploy / test software.  Windows is the host and usually the guest OS.  I often have several VMs running at a time.  This works OK but more and more I'm running up against limitations of the type-1 hypervisor - mostly lack of level-5 GPU (shader) support in the VM guests.

 

I'm interested in switching to a type-2 VM like unraid but can't seem to figure out how it would work.  How would I run more than one OS at a time without having to resort to RDP from one guest to another?  I'd like to use UnRaid to get full hardware support in the guests with bare-metal performance while also sharing devices or at least hot swapping for hardware that probably don't support concurrency like the GPU.

 

My system is an Z370-E/8700K  with IGP enabled and a 1080GTX video card so I have two video-outs available.  Could I hook up a KVM switch (the other kind of KVM) to the motherboard (IGP) graphics port and the 1080 and use that to switch between two running VMs?  Hmm, how would I connect the keyboard?  I can't really seem to get my head around solutions other than having multiple montiors & keyboards on my desk.

 

Are there any other ways to swap between running VMs without a KVM switch?  Ideally there would be some sort of hotkey to cycle between running VMs (full screen) and when one is selected it would grab the devices assigned to it.  This is roughly what I have working now using vmware workstation.

 

Thanks, I'm looking forward to trying UnRaid out once I get my head around these basics.

 

--Dave

 

Apologies in advance if this is an answered question - I haven't spent a lot of time but can's seem to find a direct answer.

[htpcguru]

UnRaid defaults to attach a VNC display to each VM so by default you would have a VNC console for each VM.  This is also true if you pass-through the GPU, unless you specifically remove the VNC display.

 

As for the GPU-attached display, I can think of 2 possibilities:

(1) Use a KVM switch as you envision above.

(2) Use a HDMI dummy dongle that emulates an HDMI display (up to 4K 60Hz).  This is particularly useful if you stream games to other displays on your LAN.

 

I have used (2) for a gaming VM and worked extremely well when streaming games to other displays in the house.

 

[GHunter]

Rather than using a KVM to share your mouse and keyboard between VM's, I use a software solution called Synergy. This allows me to use my mouse and keyboard on my main PC and share it with multiple VM's or other PC's and tablets. I think it supports hot key switching as well but I haven't bothered trying it. Another benefit of using Synergy is that it supports copy and paste between the different server and client OS's.

 

GPU's cannot be shared between VM's if they are running at the same time. However, you can use the same GPU for multiple VM's as long as they aren't running simultaneously. IGPU passthrough is supported but it is not as mature as GPU passthrough and there is some mixed success with it depending on your hardware. I've never tried IGPU passthrough as I have multiple GPU's in my system for several VM's (See my sig for my server specs). I do run 3 VM's simultaneously though each having their own GPU and this works very well and is very stable. I also use a cheap HDMI switch that I got from Monoprice.com so that I can cycle between VM's using the same monitors that I use for my main PC.