About vGPU again

[irqx]

Hello,
I have a Proxmox VE that is running on 2 x Xeons with RTX 2080 Ti installed, I passed-though it to a gaming VM
But for other VMs, where I need only some basic functionalities, but not emulated on CPU. There are 2-4 such VMs, so I cannot install 4 video adapters to pass-through them.
Ithink about purchasing some cheap video-card, like maybe NVIDIA Quadro P2000, or something similar by a price, but I've heard about licensing from NVIDIA and not sure whether it will work or not.

I tried buying Intel Iris XE card, but it requires PCI-E 4.0, and I have MB that supports only PCI-E 3.0.
Please advise a cheap way (if it is possible), maybe old radeon will be a solution, I don't know.

Thank you in advance

 

[irqx]

Has anybody tried that: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock ?

Or tried MxGPU from AMD on Radeon Instinct MI25 as the cheapest one? But 300 Watt consumption....

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Hello irqx. As you probably know, the Proxmox VE documentation for PCIe passthrough says:

But, if you pass through a device to a virtual machine, you cannot use that device anymore on the host or in any other VM.

This is otherwise possible using Intel’s GVT-g or NVIDIA's vGPU, but this requires explicit support from the GPU manufacturer.

Another possibility would be to use VirGL for host offloading, meaning that GPU processing can be done on the host, enabling multiple VMs to use hardware acceleration. The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires having a special driver in the VMs that enable this functionality, and these are not available for all platforms.

The only other possibility would be to use multiple GPUs for passing them through to each of the VMs. If you need a GPU but not a powerful one, you can use the integrated GPU (if the machine contains one), and/or buy some cheap low-power dedicated GPUs for this purpose. Of course, this also depends on the number of PCI-E slots on your motherboard, so installing 4 GPUs might be possible on some very expensive motherboards, but not on most.