Looking to virtualize a GPU-requiring app

Operating Systems & Open Source Virtualization
1

Hi,

At work, some people need to use an application that requires a GPU. The requirement is modest: apparently a Radeon HD 7750 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Different to what it might seem, we really don’t require much performance- as long as the application starts and works, it can do 5fps.

I have successfully run the application on a laptop TigerLake Iris XE, so I know it’s not very demanding.

To simplify support, it would be wonderful to be able to get a large box from Hetzner with a lot of RAM and let developers create VMs to run the software. We can also buy consumer-grade hardware; having someone like Hetzner handle the hardware for us is better, but we’re open to other options.

I am handy with Incus and Proxmox, both of which support GPU virtualization.

My question is: what is a good base hardware to implement this? I have a personal box with an Intel integrated GPU where Incus reports there are “8 VFs” for virtualization. I know Nvidia datacenter GPUs are designed for this, but they seem pretty expensive.

I’m looking at cheap, but reflashing, etc. are a last resort.

Is there anything on a similar ballpark to Hetzner (auction server with a GTX 1080 for 105€/month // “Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation” for 184€/month)?

Are Intel/AMD integrated graphics suitable for the purpose?

Cheers,

Álex

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I have been poking on my laptop with gh/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms to see if I could use get a VM in Incus to show a GPU. I suspect that really wants Proxmox, because I didn’t get it to work under Debian stable.

But although I suspect it can get to work, and it seems to be a kernel module from Intel, it’s a bit more moving pieces than I want for a “commercial development” setup. I’ll continue my research, but if I can do something with less moving parts, that’d be great.

(I realize few moving parts is unlikely outside datacenter grade hardware.)

(BTW, although we can live with bad performance and limited graphics, if there’s any solution that gets us Moonlight/Sunshine nice streaming of 3D graphics, that would be great.)

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(Also wondering if VirGL is a good idea in this scenario.)