The technology has "been there" for a while, it's trivial do setup what you're asking for, the issue is that games have anti cheat engines that will get triggered by the virtualization and ban you.
Which games do that? Running pasthrough gpu on windows for destiny and halo at least gave me 0 issues for years
Anything using vanguard such as valorant and league of legends, battleye such as pubg, destiny 2, and rainbow 6 siege, and easy anti cheat such as fortnight blocks virtual machines. Vanguard is especially bad because it will not allow to run the game with Intel-VT/AMD-V enabled even if you are running bare metal as of its last update.
That’s weird destiny 2 has never given me issue, though I don’t play super frequently so maybe I’m just lucky
I'm surprised, I was pretty sure anything with Battleye flat out rejected virtualization.
I thought Destiny used Battleye but I must be mistaken on one of these points.
I’ve been doing exactly that at home for a couple years now. First with Parsec, now Sunshine/Moonlight.
Host is Proxmox on Ryzen 5800x, 64gm RAM GPU is 2070 Super, with VGPU patched drivers from https://gitlab.com/polloloco/vgpu-proxmox
When I’m gaming I’ll dedicate the full 8Gb to my windows Vm, otherwise I split it in 2 or 4Gb chunks to Jellyfin or my home camera monitoring. 8gb can’t split very many ways, and most things require at least 2 to run.
Locally at home I can run 1440p 60fps rock solid over wifi on any device, from my phone/old laptop/apple tv/raspberry pi. Remote I can do 1080p60, but a bit more hit or miss depending on my network connection.
Experimenting with LLMs I’ve done through the same windows VM, or to a ubuntu dev VM. Works the same way. I’m thinking of transitioning my gaming VM to Linux too.
The amount of VRAM is the hard limitation to get past, the virtualization tech itself has been there for a while.
But to be perfectly honest……it really was just a “let’s see if I could do this” type task, direct GPU pass though is more straightforward and it’s not really worth splitting 8Gb these days. Unless you get a card with significantly more VRAM passthrough is much less work.
This is really amazing! In theory, can you can use 2gb with 4 different VMs?
Sure, but you’ll get diminishing returns most likely as consumer hardware doesn’t really have the resources to scale that way very well if all the VMs are running demanding apps simultaneously.
Even for something like 4 VMs that just do NVenc, there are limits for how many streams the GPU can do. I think there’s another patch that lets you raise that, but at some point you’ll run out of resources quick. Even powerful consumer gear isn’t really designed to be used by more than one user/app and it starts to show the more you virtualize and split those resources.
How does the vGPU compare to running it on the bare metal? Last I tried things were painful but technically usable.
I don’t see any performance differences with the vgpu actually. I have more performance bottlenecks with the CPU, and my RAM isn’t the fastest, so I think I’m more CPU limited. Benchmarks I have run that are GPU focused seem to show little to no difference from what the physical card would do.
I bought a cheap used Dell R710 on Facebook marketplace for like $100 or so, as well as an ups, rack, 10g switch, etc, from various other sellers. All told, I’ve got about $500 in my server setup.
Installed proxmox on it. It’s “free” if you don’t buy a license. You just have to put up with a little nag screen when you open the control panel but it still works 100%, much like winrar.
Works great.
Edit: just realized this is in c/selfhosted AND I misunderstood the post. I’m gonna leave it here just on the off chance it’s useful to somebody, but I acknowledge it’s not what you’re looking for.
Btw just in case you aren't aware, the nag can be done away with. I don't have a link off the top of my head but it's out there.
I've also wanted to do this for a while, but there were always a few too many barriers to actually spin up the project. Here's just a brain dump of things I've seen recently.
vGPUs continue to be behind a license. But there is now vgpu_unlock.
L1T just showed off PCIe "fabric" from Liqid that can switch physical devices between machines.
Turning VMs on and off isn't as slick as either of the above, but that is doable today. You'll just have to build all the switching automation yourself. That could just be a shell script running QEMU/libvirt commands, at a minimum.
I know you asked about VMs, but fwiw there are GPU-capable containers now: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/latest/install-guide.html
Used one of these and the setup is as easy as it sounds. It can run Houdini, Stable Diffusion.
You're not really describing your use-case here. Are you just trying to run a server that does all your rendering for you so you can play games elsewhere? Yes, that's totally possible.
If you're trying to describe a business...no, it's not possible, scalable, or profitable.
I'm curious as to what your intentions are here though.
I have a workstation I use for video editing/vfx as well as gaming. Because of my work, I'm fortunate to have the latest high end GPUs and a 160" projector screen. I also have a few TVs in various rooms around the house.
Traditionally, if I want to watch something or play a video game, I have to go to the room with the jellyfin/plex/roku box to watch something and am limited to the work/gaming rig to play games. I can't run renders and game at the same time. Buying an entire new pc so I can do both is a massive waste of money. If I want to do a test screening of a video I'm working on to see how it displays on various devices, I have to transfer the file around to these devices. This is limiting and inefficient to me.
I want to be able to go to any screen in my house: my living room TV, my large projector in my studio room, my tablet, or even my phone and switch between:
You can use proxmox to do most of this. Currently my set will only pass-through the gpu to one VM. I have heard of splitting the power among VMs but I have not gone down that rabbit hole. If I want to play with llms I fire up that server, if I want to game, I shut that down and fire up my windows 10 vm.
In Proxmox they have VirGL-GPU and Virtio-GPU. They allow VMs to pass work to the GPU without being dedicated to one VM. I don't think gaming was the intended use case and don't know what kind of performance you would get. My uninformed guess is that it would not be great.
OK, but why?
Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don't let me stop you.
But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?
For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you'd probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you're smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.
Yep this has been my hold up. It is mostly just a solution in search of a problem.
The best use case I have come up with is if you have an nice computer and an extra GPU laying around. You could turn the single computer into two workstation/gaming computers.
I currently have a setup exactly like this, with a threadripper 2950x, an RX 6600, and a 2070 super.
Let me know if you have any questions in the specifics, but its 100% possible
Best part of this setup is being able to connect to both via sunshine on many displays at once
I've recently tried to do that using sunsine and different linux gaming distros and it was awful, the VM was working great for a few minutes and then suddenly crashes and I have to hard stop it.
All the people that I've seen talking about it on the internet are using Windows VMs so I guess that I'm doing something wrong or the only way to do it is through a Windows VM, which I'll not even try.
I run a gaming Linux VM on my server and it works fine.
Could you explain how? I'm pretty lost in this situation...
I’ve recently tried to do that using sunsine and different linux gaming distros and it was awful, the VM was working great for a few minutes and then suddenly crashes and I have to hard stop it.
Are you running this with something like libvirtd/qemu? If so, VFIO configurations can get pretty complex. Random crashes seem like MSI interrupt issues (or you've allocated too much RAM to the guest). Or it could be GPU reset issues that would also occur on the (Linux) host, a newer kernel and Mesa version in the guest may help.
Setting on the kernel commandline for the host to workaround MSR interrupt crashes:
kvm.ignore_msrs=1
If you're running on a Windows host or with something like Virtualbox (assuming GPU passthrough is supported by these), YMMV but I wouldn't expect good results.
I got stardew working on a local network and playing on the miyoo mini. It was cool for the novelty, but had terrible performance outside a local network. After only a couple of hops it's unplayable and will disconnect.
Craft computing has been chasing this for several years now. His most recent attempt being the most successful one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RvpAF77G8_8
You should take a look at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp3yVOm6A55nx65STpm3tXQ he does have a serie about doing something like this and go in depth in it
As others have expressed- were already there. Understand though that the reason this hasn't caught on mainstream is the entire purpose of what you are asking is simple: it runs counter to the standards of commercial capitalism. We are talking about efficiency, self hosting, doing more with less, and cutting strings.
That said- understand that what you are undertaking is not dissimilar from building infrastructure in a company. You are building and expanding to meet your needs. Your needs are unique so there isn't a 'turn key' solution that will fit perfectly... so you need to try things and see what works.
As far as things you are talking about specifically: you are going to ultimately be dipping your toes into the virtualization world... so xcp-ng and proxmox are good choices. If you can get your hands on older copies and uh... source a key or two: esxi is also very beginner friendly but won't be able to upgrade thanks to their new pricing model. You seem like you are aware of the YouTube sphere so let me recommend 2GuysTech and the series on different hypervisors.
Once you decide on a hypervisor it's as 'simple' as building a PC to meet your needs. If you have one already I'd start there to get a feel for how much you can pull out of it to determine how much you may need. You can probably split up a single GPU or just pass it through (cost vs performance.). LLMs are power / resource hungry so that may require it's own GPU.
If power is cheap by you you can look into older server hardware but honestly this can be a messy space to dabble in (noise, heat, power costs.)
From there play with services that fit your needs.
It's very doable and there are some easier paths to take... certainly- but again the thing about homelabs is it's very custom. This is why the community (in general) is willing to help. We all have had to forge the same path.
None of the presented solutions cover the aspect of being in a different place than the rack, the same network is fine, but at a minimum a different room.
How do you deliver high resolution (e.g. 1440p, 144 fps) to multiple monitors with low latency over a network? I haven't seen anything like that accomplished without running fiber from the host.
Eventually, your thin client will need too much power anyway, making the costs rise a lot. It makes sense in an office where you have 500 seats and you can load balance resources.
If someone can show me a multi seat gaming server that has native remote performance (as in you drag windows around in 144 fps, not the standard artifacty high latency behavior of vnc) I'll eat a shoe.
Yep just ping time and latency make this a no go for a vast majority of us.
Unraid does an excellent job at this. I helped a friend setup a rack mounted server, it runs home assistant, some other containers, and a VM for him to work in, or play games. AMD GPU being passed through.
Do you really need multiple VMs, can't you run all at one? The easiest would be to install some windows/Linux on a single machine. Then stream your games with Sunshine/Moonshine and connect over RDP/VPN?
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