VDI Server build for home office

So I have moved in with my fiancee and we are sharing an office. At some point in the next year or so we are talking about getting her a new computer. I have been progressing in my studies (cybersecurity and networking) and would like a home lab for some projects I have in my head. What is the feasibility or recommendations on building a TR Pro rig and running a VDI environment? It would just be for myself and my fiancee. Maybe spin up an instance for family members here and there if they come to me with a compute problem they don’t have the horsepower for. I don’t game like I used to and she needs the graphics power for Adobe products and video conferencing so I am not so concerned with game compatibility. I also run PiHole and a few other low power services on RaspberryPi Zero’s and would like to replace these implementations with docker containers on the TR machine.

Any thoughts or recommendations? I understand it would be easier to just build independent machines for this kind of work but I feel like it would be a great learning experience for me and I am trying to build up my portfolio and resume.

For this use case is TR the right direction to go or would Epyc be a better choice? Also with the way graphics cards are in demand rn I feel like it would be more cost effective to buy used Tesla cards off of ebay and use her old Surface Pro as a thin client to access the VDI. Is VFIO or SR-IOV the correct implementation here? Also, is remoting in from outside my LAN an attainable goal? We both travel pretty frequently as she is from San Diego and I am from Washington and we are getting ready to move to Colorado. Being able to just leave my server on when we travel and then access my VDI from my laptop would be ideal. I think that setting up a VPN server that I can log into would be great. Is this the right direction?

PS: I use Linux almost exclusively and just start up a Win10 VM if I absolutely have to for work. She uses Win10 as her work requires her to use Adobe and Microsoft applications.

Yeah I don’t really know about all the SRIOV stuff but some of them either allow NVEnc or Compute but most of the time not both, which is a bummer as NVEnc would be awesome to have in a VDI scenario. What you definately should be using is parsec. It works amazingly well with Nvida cards (not so much on AMD sadly). Parsec also has a Linux client as well, but Wayland is a wip currently I’d say as keybindings don’t get passed through and hw accel doesn’t work as well.

Those old Tesla cards are a pain in the butt check out Craft Computing he’s got a lot of videos on that matter. There is also a vGPU-Unlocker now, which can be used to allow it on GeForce cards. I don’t know how well it works but I’ve you’ve already got a supported card, you could try it out.

Thanks for the heads up on Parsec, I will check it out.

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