It's time to virtualize!

[Veeh]

Hello!

I’ve been working on this project for quite some time now.
I’ve been using an old config to run some VM at home and I also use it as a lab to try stuff !

The goal for the past couple of month was to get rid of my dektop and use a VM instead.

This little guy is doing the job for 3 years now but it’s time to take an early retirement.
(Gigabyte GA-AB350N, Ryzen 1600X, 16Go DDR4, GTX 1080)

This is the home lab. (Asrock Z97 extreme6, i7 4790K, 32Go DDR3, a couple of drives of all sort…)
I already had place the 1080 inside the lab.

Now the good stuff.
The lab run Proxmox 6.1.
I have been experimenting passthrough since the version5.

I was able to make GPU passthrough work in RDP for quite some time, but I never tryed to plug my monitor/mouse/keybord directly on the host.
I could not run some game in RDP. Those that need fullscreen at launch and other did not launch at all.

Now this problem is solved.

There’s a lot more cable at the back now !
But the perf so far are really nice.

I’ve noticed a big difference in AAA games. I guess it’s due to the drop in CPU and RAM
(The VM has 4 vcpu and 16Go of ram)
But I haven’t try a lot of them yet. This is quite new. So i’ll keep investigate.

I have 3 VM running at the moment.
A NAS, my Win10 and NFS cache use a lot of ram, folding@home is only CPU.
Temp are correct and no wierdness so far ! I’m impressed, It’s working really good !

This is just a start, later on I plan to change the hardware. I would like to run my girfriend computer on the lab, as well as my “dummy” vm.

The “cleaner” desk…

I’ll update the post along the way. Don’t hesitate if you have any questions.

Cheers.
Veeh.

[futurelesscynic]

Nice build! I was using Proxmox for similar home lab fun before and I really enjoyed it.

Were you actually using RDP for remote gaming instead of software like Moonlight, Parsec, or Steam In-home Streaming? If so, was the RDP streaming experience enjoyable?

That’s a beautiful second desk you have there. I especially like the untreated plywood desktop. /s (rest of my post is sincere though)

[Veeh]

Yes I was using RDP for remote gaming. I do not know Moonlight. I tryed to setup Parsec without success. And steam streaming wasn’t that great.
RDP stream was ok. The only bad thing was that I couldn’t launch certain games.
But beside that it was working quite great.

The plywood desk is brand new as well. I made it a couple of week ago. I need to add wall to hide the frame on the sides and apply paint after that.

If the “test” are ok, I’ll mouve on the a more permanent solution.