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Ask HN: Hypervisor setup for gaming/servers

1 points by bndw ↗ HN
I'm interested in converting my home workstation from one-OS-per-disk to a hypervisor running VMs. I like the idea of having more reproducible, ephemeral instances without having to dual boot (think containers).

My use case is primarily to run containerized services in a 24/7 linux vm, while having a Windows VM for gaming that sits in a stopped/paused state most of the time.

- Is anyone else running a similar setup?

- What hypervisor would you recommend (Xen, KVM)?

- Is it realistic to get decent gpu perf through VT-d/gpu passthrough?

- Can I do this on my fairly consumer-grade machine (MSI mobo, nvidia gpu)?

2 comments

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sarcasmatwork
I have not done passthrough with a GPU, so I cant comment on how "good" it will be. You will need to see if your hardware supports it, and then see how stable it is and is it really worth it. I'd also make sure your system has enough resources (cpu, memory, disk) to do what you want to do with this setup.

I work with passthrough networking devices everyday in KVM, so I would suggest KVM, vs HyperV.

Have you seen this? https://blog.zerosector.io/2018/07/28/kvm-qemu-windows-10-gp...

chmielewski
The fact that your server would be locally on site eases two of the major pain points... If the Windows games you're playing on your VM are resource intensive, why not instead just do a V2P to a bare metal gaming rig each time you want to refresh the OS from your "reproducible" image? This would eliminate many more difficult scenarios... however if the games you're playing on the VM are not resource-intensive, especially if they're 2D, then sure GPU passthrough stuff may be the easiest and best-performing option for you considering all the overhead of maintaining a separate, physical box.

Use a Type I hypervisor and expect to tweak your configuration endlessly... and once it's working, endlessly still more...

I'd recommend ProxMox... here's a setup that worked for somebody: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/gpu-passthrough-tutorial-r...

I've set up an online gaming company/system that's rather novel but my implementation is far removed from yours, as you have dedicated graphics on a local hypervisor.