Help with virtualization and GPU passthrough


dheg

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Hi All,

 

Due to life and stuff (I've became the proud father of a beautiful daughter!) I've been out of business for almost two years, in fact, my server is still down, if everything goes well, is going up this week!

 

In this time, I've moved to a new place and need to reduce my hardware footprint, which means I need to drop my office PC to keep the unraid server.  My first thought has been to build a Win 10 VM and a couple of questions are going through my head:

  • Is virtualization mature enough in unraid to use a VM as a home PC.?Purpose would be photoshop, lightroom, and if possible gaming.
  • What GPU would you recommend if I were to start from scratch? My mb is the old and reliable Supermicro X9SCM-F-O, CPU Intel Xeon E3-1240 and 64GB of RAM (DDR3 1333 ECC Unbuffered. Could I use this hardware or would I need something different?

 

Sorry for the questions, I've been out for so long I don't know where to start, in fact the unraid version I still have is 6.2.x 😅!

 

Thanks in advance for you help!

 

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I believe that mobo has 2x pcie x8 slots so should work fine

I dont believe you will see a great performance increase if you got faster ram, but others may have different opinions. I have 64gb 2133 ecc and never really use more than 16GB for a vm. The rest is used as temporary cache I believe

As with a lot of things unRAID, ymmv

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Your question on whether it is mature enough...it sure is.

 

I have 3*1080ti each allocated to a gaming Windows 10 VM for myself and my kids.  Check out the excellent videos from Space Invader One on how.  I game in 4k, the kids in 1080p.

 

To game, you can use the Moonlight application (free) which uses Nvidia streaming.  You can use remote desktop by sharing the mstsc.exe application via the Nvidia Geforce app.  You might also need a display emulator (really cheap) plugged into a display or hdmi port on the GPU so the VM thinks there is a monitor attached to it.

Edited by Nigel
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17 hours ago, Nigel said:

I have 3*1080ti each allocated to a gaming Windows 10 VM for myself and my kids.  Check out the excellent videos from Space Invader One on how.  I game in 4k, the kids in 1080p.

that's a nice setup, may I ask what is your hardware for that?

 

17 hours ago, Nigel said:

To game, you can use the Moonlight application (free) which uses Nvidia streaming.  You can use remote desktop by sharing the mstsc.exe application via the Nvidia Geforce app.  You might also need a display emulator (really cheap) plugged into a display or hdmi port on the GPU so the VM thinks there is a monitor attached to it.

Can you game 4K without connecting to the GPU output? Could you give more detail on how it works please?

 

If so I could install the server in the basement, and release some more space from the home office (I thought I'd need a KVM-over-ethernet adaptor)

 

 

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Hardware in my signature :).  It's a rack mount server that I used for crypto mining during the good years, and now have retired and upgraded it for more interesting use running games and other VMs.

 

I game just fine at 4k - playing Assassins Creed Odyssey at the moment.  The moonlight app streams over ethernet, and it uses the hardware compression capability of the card to compress at the server end, and decompress at the client end.  So it's not quite as perfect quality as connecting directly over display port, but it still looks great to me.  You can use any old GFX card in your PC that supports h264 or HEVC decompression.  Bandwidth for 4k is 80Mbps, but the moonlight app allows to use up to 150Mbps (which I do).  If you have a gigabit network in your house it's fine.  If you run over power line, I can't comment as that might introduce latency.

 

If you need to connect devices like a USB joystick, you can use USB over ethernet (my son uses a steering wheel for example).  Software is called VirtualHere, and you'd just treat your PC as the server, and your VM as the client.

 

My server is in my garage, so my office is free from noise and heat in the summer.

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Ok, so you are streaming to another pc... Dumb of me...

My goal is completely remove my physical pc, so the server in the basement and just a monitor in my office.
For this i guess i need a kvm over ethernet to pass video, mouse, keyboard, joystick and so on...


Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

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