Hey all, new to this forum, and I’ll keep this brief.
I’m speccing a 16 core threadripper build with 64 gigs of ram and a couple of vega 64s.
I’m interested in virtualising all of its roles, because I have lots of different dev heavy workloads (alot of which is virtualised anyway), thin clients for around the house, and gaming of course!
Here’s the kicker - in the event I’m not actively using the machine in any of the above roles, I would like it to be “walk away safe”, such that it will adopt the necessary power states from fully on to the deepest of sleeps.
So - a virtualised host (say latest Ubuntu, with QEMU/KVM), and a bunch of guest operating systems, mix of Windows / Linux. Presumably - the guest operating systems will just enter sleep states as per their individual configurations, but the host I would like to enter sleep state when it’s not in active use and all the guests have entered standby states. I intend to wake it & guests with WOL.
Is this kind of power saving scheme feasible, a few nights in front of a few terminal windows not withstanding?
Vega 64 is not going to be energy efficient. In fact, energy saving C-states might cause issues with the VMs with stutter.
Consistent use is better than engaging power savings for gaming.
With Vega and Radeon VII, you should look into whether the reset issue has been once and for all fixed. This could cause major headaches engaging or shutting down VMs.
If you want stability you’re going to want the host to just run at all times.
Is there a reason you’d need the power savings? Are you in an area where power is limited? Not that the feature wouldn’t be cool as hell, but I think this tech has been primarily pioneered in an environment where the host running 24/7 is a matter of fact.
Throw my two cents out at current stability for Vager, pretty good. I can lock and have my machine go to sleep and come back to it, but in this instance your mileage may vary.
When the host & guests are under active use, I don’t have any great expectations as to energy efficiency. For gaming, as an example, I would expect performance to be pegged at maximum power (I’ve experienced stutter in wattman states under bare-metal Win 10 ).
But when I know it’s inactive, if I were to exit my applications/games, walk away from it, I would expect the guests to enter sleep states, and then the host to enter a sleep state.
I just want it for the fluffy green feeling inside ! Oh, and to impress the misses; she would hate a computer being “fully on” whilst not being “fully used”.
@Leon_the_Loner your anecdotal experience raises my spirit some what! Hope to complete the build by June, just researching at the mo.
If you were to do it I’d go ahead and get a bunch of vms deployed and test it out. I can’t say 100% that finding a GPU that will play nice in this setup is impossible, but I think it’s highly unlikely.
The biggest thing to look out for is stuff that actually resets properly on VM shutdown. If it doesn’t, your entire host will lock up upon shutting down and starting up a VM.
Okay, good thinking. My current system has been ridden hard and put away wet one too many times sadly, frequent bootloops, usb hub failures, no more audio. Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H, Intel Core I5 2500k, 16Gb Corsair Ram. Over 6 years old now.
Providing she can last long enough, I’ll try out my intended virtualisation stack on a couple of spare drives.
).
! Oh, and to impress the misses; she would hate a computer being “fully on” whilst not being “fully used”.