I’m seeking advice, and I hope I have placed this thread in the right subsection. I’m trying to build a small home lab capable of VDI or, essentially, a cloud gaming server with another server for TrueNAS, and a Pfsense box. This project is something I have been sitting on for a while, watching various sources, Level1, Craft Computing, and some others to get suggestions. I love the idea of using recycled enterprise gear, but hardware has never been my strongest suit, so determining if it would work well together is the problem.
The project aims to create a cloud gaming server that my brother and I can share. He lives in another country, and I seldom see him, so gaming is our quality time. I was hoping for a local storage server for games, movies, etc. I have saved for the last year and set aside a budget of roughly 3000. I also have two RTX 3090s to use in the build.
With all of that being said, what sort of gear would you suggest? Thank you for the assistance.
I’m located outside Atlanta, and running a few tests, it averages between 56 ms to 79 ms, with a jitter of 2.41 ms. It might not be the best, but something I have wanted to try and felt it was worth the endeavor.
Old enterprise gear can be fun but it’s terrible for gaming.
Focus your aim to have you and your brother gaming via remote on one machine with two GPUs.
You should basically build a typical gaming machine and fit both GPUs. One for you and one for your brother.
Install Proxmox so that you can passthrough one GPU to one VM and the other GPU to the other VM. You do need to tell Proxmox not to grab the GPUs for itself. You need to set the right BIOS settings to allow PCIe pass through and do some config file tweaks in Proxmox. It’s all in the Proxmox documentation. It’s not hard if you’ve built PCs before.
Buy giving your VM USB passthough you can use it as a normal PC for gaiming. But that might give you an unfair advantage against the remote gamer.
You can remote into these VMs using Windows Remote Desktop but there are better remote desktops for gamers.
You will naturally get the ability to run a bunch of other VMs on this system. You probably want a simple file server so both gaming machines can share downloads.
Idk what kind of games you are playing but that might be acceptable for strategy games/RTS or maybe turn based games. Might be a bit rough in FPS or third person shooters etc.