Recommendations for virtualizing a home lab?

Software & Operating Systems
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1

Any operating system recommendations for virtualizing a home lab? I’m leaning towards proxmox, but I guess ESXi and unraid have strong followings.

I’m trying to consolidate some of my older workstations and gamers and make the best use of a slightly less old x299 build. Limited currently to 10 cores, I envision the following use cases:

  • Dual (Windows 7 and/or 10) gaming setup, with GPU pass through, (i.e. 2 gamers, 1 PC)
  • Thin client server (ubuntu) to laptop/tablet
  • Being able to run various linux distros either remotely or locally and make use of multiple CPUs, GPU’s for transcoding, hashing, image processing like openDroneMap etc…
    *i’d like to experiment with machine learning and large datasets at some point…

I have a separate freeNAS build which I’m not looking to consolidate at this time, but possibly in the future.

Relevant hardware includes:

  • EVGA X299 Dark
  • i9-7900X
  • 64GB RAM
  • Multiple GTX 1080 cards
    *NVMe drives

Bonus question: With this setup and hardware, what would be the best way to run a Windows XP VM for gaming? I don’t think hardware passthrough would work since XP lacks modern chipset and GPU drivers.

Appreciate any guidance, or experience others are willing to share.

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I’m looking into running oVirt for my homelab, but it’s probably overkill for both of our use cases. Most of these though are just wrappers for QEMU+KVM+LibVirt. So if you want something lightweight but maybe a bit more technical, Virt-Manager is another option

3

In the event this helps others, proxmox 6.2 install and setup was straightforward following the proxmox guide. Some of the other guides online for setting up windows 10 with pci passthrough were a little outdated and probably created a few unnecessary hurdles

I was able to setup multiple windows VMs each with a dedicated GTX 1080 being passed through as well as dedicated USB peripherals, so easy success setting up 2 gamers 1 pc.

slot1 has as 1030 for the proxmox terminal
slot2 1080 gtx, running x8 since it shares lanes with slot 1.
slot3 1080 gtx running x16.
slot 4 empty.

I’d like to remove the 1030 and get both gtx 1080 cards running x16 in the future. this is probably straightforward, but for now acceptable.

Some lessons learned:

  1. installing proxmox on zfs with uefi support requires using systemd not grub.
  2. the parameters passed to kernel during boot included arguments for iommu support as well ignoring x2apic opt_out.

the rest of what i want to do with the homelab should be fairly straightforward.