Daily drivablility of Windows/Linux on ESXi w/ GPU Passthrough & direct ext. display output

[xadamentx]

Hi there,

I’m in the middle of planning a long needed hardware refresh & I’m thinking about ditching my old “server” (really just an old PC) and replacing it and my current workstation with just one new box. My current plan is to run ESXi (& vCenter) on it to get more experience working with it for my upcoming job.

I already tried to somewhat do what I have planned on my current machine but had some trouble getting the PCIe Passthrough to work properly. I did get it to work how I wanted it to for like 5 minutes but it always breaks after plugging in/out additional monitors. Does someone here have a somewhat similar setup which is robust enough to work in a semi production enviroment? If yes, which hardware was used and what pitfalls should I watch out for?

Also cuz I know this setup is kinda stupid feel free to recommend other setups I could try instead lol. One of my other thought was running ESXi on my server & connecting my workstation via iSCSI, essentially networkbooting off it to have snapshow capabilities of the File System. Not sure if that’s any better tho…

PS: first post & not native in english so sorry for errors in logic or syntax.

[FunnyPossum]

I tried this, and it was a pain in the butt. Yeah, you can get it to work, but the whole setup is just too complicated to be stable

IMO your ESXi server and your desktop should be separate. I do however have a Windows VM on my ESXi box that I use for certain things, especially from a laptop. Say I want to download something big, I just RDP to my VM and download it there since it will stay on no matter what

That said, I’m sure you could get it to work just fine. But, I think you’ll end up with them separated out

[xadamentx]

Hm. Thought as much. Guess I’ll have to re-think a bit what to do now… thanks for the answer though! Imma try to get this updated when I find a solution that works for me.