Doubts about Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversion.

[vaibhavyagnik]

My office has an installation of two Windows 7 embedded Industrial PC and a single Windows XP Industrial PC. The Industrial PC are obsolete and there is no hardware support from manufacturers. If I upgrade hardware, windows will have to upgraded because drivers won't be available for newer hardware. If I upgrade windows, the software running on them will have to upgraded. The overall cost is very high and so I turned towards virtualization. As a trial, I virtualized the XP machine using Orcale Virtualbox running on windows 7 host machine. Now I want to do it for all 3 machines, but this time I want the host to be Proxmox. This is what I want to achieve, please let me know if my approach is correct.
1. Get a powerful server - atleast 8 cores, 16 threads and 16 GB of memory, 3 Display outs and 3 Network connections
2. Boot the server using proxmox and virtualize the three machines with each machine having 2 cores, 1 display out and 1 network connection passed
3. Connect display to each display out so that I have 3 screens and the operating personel don't get confused and they don't get confused switching browser tabs

My first question, is it possible?
My second question, the Industrial PC use hardware dongles for license. I was able to pass them through to the virtual machine during the trial by installing the drivers for the dongle for windows 7 (host os) and then passing it through the virtual machine. Will I have to install the drivers for proxmox also? If yes, which flavour of linux is proxmox based on?

 

[aaron]

I would first test it in principle, maybe with some hardware you already have around for 1 or 2 VMs.

Regarding memory: I guess those VMs don't need much, but make sure you have a bit left for the host itself.

Get one GPU per VM to pass it through. For the USB dongles, you should get the best result if you pass through a full USB controller via PCI passthrough.

So that would mean, 2 PCI slots per VM, 1 for the GPU, 1 for the USB Controller. And then, possibly one more, for a network card.

So you are looking at 6 to 7 PCI slots.

SR-IOV is also something that you will most likely need, especially if you want to pass through different ports of the same physical NIC to different VMs.
Depending on how the IOMMU groups are defined by the BIOS, the PCI passthrough could be a bit tricky as well.

But if you got a board that can do that nicely, I don't see why it shouldn't work.

Again, I would start small with a proof of concept before going all in.