Hey all, I’ve been planning on building a home server for a while now (for things like NextCloud, Collabora Office, Gitea, Home Assistant, and experimenting with other potentially useful things). I have also had a deep desire to get into VR gaming, especially now that Half-Life: Alyx is out. I’ve not wanted to build a separate rig just for playing VR and considering that the server will already be in the living room (no Ethernet in the apartment, so it needs to be near the modem), combining the two projects seems like a natural path forward.
My plan so far has been to use Proxmox as the base OS and use Linux VMs/Docker for the server applications and a Windows VM for VR gaming. I would pass in a graphics card, USB 3.0 card, and a dedicated storage drive to the Windows VM. I’d connect the headset and TV directly into the graphics card.
Initial thoughts on the hardware are a Ryzen 7 3700X, RX 5700 XT, and 32 GB RAM. I’d give the gaming VM 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. I know the 5700 XT has a reset bug. I would prefer to support AMD, because their cards tend to play better with Linux. But if using the patch is more of a headache than it’s worth, I am willing to explore other options.
So my questions are:
Does the idea itself seem reasonable enough? Any concerns about noise, passthrough, etc?
Does the hardware seem powerful enough? Should I use an NVIDIA GPU to get around the reset bug?
Anything obvious I’m missing or other recommendations?
Stretch goal: It’d be fun to play around with streaming games from the server on my local network and possibly externally. Anything about this setup that would cause issues with that (or other advice)?
If this doesn’t look feasible, I can always move my desktop up and down the stairs (I’m not too clumsy, so that’s probably safe ) or investigate using en eGPU with my laptop.
Yes, you might want to give six cores to the VM, since if they are not used then the host can still use them.
However, the area you might have issues with is the USB 3.0 card. I have an Oculus rift cv1, and the software is VERY picky about ports the headset and sensors work in, I basically have to plug things into specific ports. So you have to pick a card that has enough PCIe bandwith, enough USB controller bandwidth, enough power, and no reset issues.
) or investigate using en eGPU with my laptop.