Gaming on Proxmox based VM's

[I-Gamer]

Hi everyone!
I would make a virtualization system based on Proxmox. These are the application that I would like to run on the clients :
*Gaming at very High resolution (3440x1440 or more) and at the best settings avaliable
*watch high res movies
*office use
*internet browsing

The max number of che clients that will be ON at the same time is 4.
I have a 1 gigabit switch, is it enough?
What hardware and clients should I use?
Is it possible?

Thanks for your help!!!

 

[1nerdyguy]

Hi everyone!
I would make a virtualization system based on Proxmox. These are the application that I would like to run on the clients :
*Gaming at very High resolution (3440x1440 or more) and at the best settings avaliable
*watch high res movies
*office use
*internet browsing

The max number of che clients that will be ON at the same time is 4.
I have a 1 gigabit switch, is it enough?
What hardware and clients should I use?
Is it possible?

Thanks for your help!!!

Many stand alone desktops have a hard time gaming at that resolution, let alone when piping it through virtualization. You might be shooting for the moon a bit here.

I'm sure it's "possible", if you're willing throw oodles of cash at it to have designated video cards per VM, plus the oodles of CPU you'll need per vm, and ram, and storage IO, etc.

Would be cheaper to just build stand alone machines, probably.

 

[I-Gamer]

Many stand alone desktops have a hard time gaming at that resolution, let alone when piping it through virtualization. You might be shooting for the moon a bit here.

I'm sure it's "possible", if you're willing throw oodles of cash at it to have designated video cards per VM, plus the oodles of CPU you'll need per vm, and ram, and storage IO, etc.

Would be cheaper to just build stand alone machines, probably.

Thanks for your reply!
I was thinking about having one PC with multiple clients, so I can play one time from TV with my friends, one time from my bedroom... Etc. And I woud Like to replace other non-gaming pcs with clients so they can have more power if they need it.
Can the graphic load be splitted on multiple gpu and on multiple vms?

Thanks for your time!!!

 

[Frazze]

I don't think this is possible in a _reasonable_ way with Proxmox. BUT you should take a look at Valve Steams new inhouse streaming feature. It allows you to only need one powerfull PC where all the 'hardcore' GPU/CPU work is done and then the picture of that can be streamed to your TV, to other non-powerfull PC's in your house. It has some minor lag, so if you are looking for some competetive gaming where every millisecond counts that won't do it, but else, you should take a look at it.

If you want to really do this with Proxmox and want to have _multiple clients at the same time gaming_ you will need multiple GPUs on the Proxmox host, i.e. for every client/VM one GPU. But if you _only play from one place at a time_ (for example you only play from bedroom, while at the same time NO ONE else plays from somewhere else) you can do this all with one GPU as you only run one "client"/VM at a time.
But then again: this still is not the correct concept as it still has a lot of overhead.

I guess Valve's In-Home Streaming is what you really want, here take a look:
http://store.steampowered.com/streaming/?l=english

 

[Milkwyrm]

I've not done anything with this sort of setup, but from reading doesnt the VFIO passthrough only work with monitors plugged into the qemu server? It doesnt hand off the display to a remote client (think VNC/Spice) like the microsoft solution does ala RemoteFX?
I'm a little confused as to how this can be acheved with proxmox. for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37D2bRsthfI shows it in action, but using the host also as the client.. Is anyone able explain how this works?

 

[spirit]

I've not done anything with this sort of setup, but from reading doesnt the VFIO passthrough only work with monitors plugged into the qemu server? It doesnt hand off the display to a remote client (think VNC/Spice) like the microsoft solution does ala RemoteFX?
I'm a little confused as to how this can be acheved with proxmox. for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37D2bRsthfI shows it in action, but using the host also as the client.. Is anyone able explain how this works?

This video show vga passthrough, than mean that a windows vm is launched and graphic card is attached to this vms with passthrough. This works locally only.
So, you have your linux host using videocard1 (embedded intel)-monitor1 and windows vm-videocard2-monitor2.

they are no way to stream it with spice, because of passthrough. (This should require some special virtual 3d drivers, but it's not yet available)

For streamng, you need an application in your windows vm to do it. (steam streaming for example).

 

[Milkwyrm]

Thanks Spirit.
So from that discription it sounds like what the OP is after isnt really something a non-GUI solution like proxmox would do (unless it is non-3D gaming) right?
It will be very cool once something like Virgil3D makes it out into the real world, but for now I'm eagerly awaiting red hats qxl-wddm drivers so I can get a functional windows 8.1 spice install

 

[I-Gamer]

I tried steam in-home-streaming few months ago... And it worked well, but I would Like to have multiple VM (one for every user), I am the only one that play games and the other users want to do: office, multimedia, internet browsing while I'm gaming.
Is there a way to allocate dynamically the load of the gpus and share them between the VMs ? Thank you a lot!

 

[spirit]

I tried steam in-home-streaming few months ago... And it worked well, but I would Like to have multiple VM (one for every user), I am the only one that play games and the other users want to do: office, multimedia, internet browsing while I'm gaming.
Is there a way to allocate dynamically the load of the gpus and share them between the VMs ? Thank you a lot!

you can only passthrough 1 vga card by vm.

(but for office/internet browsing you don't need passthrough, use spice with virtual graphic card)

 

[wahmed]

I believe it is going to be very much possible when the nvidia Grid vGPU is implemented in Proxmox. This works on vmware and Xen althoughin its early stage. With this it is possible to play 3D games with full features through RDP. RemoteFX requires Hyper-V so thats out of question for Proxmox.
You "may" be able to get decent games out of your PC through RDP if you can passthrough your graphics card to your VM. I think the next Proxmox release going to have that ability ? Or is it already available in Proxmox?

 

[Miguel Moreira]

I have a similar config, 1 node 4 vm's and 4 GPU , each gpu with one VM, also, this vm need run over a hard disk, is not possible use over CEPH. for run I make the next config : 1-vm +Windows10+1PGU+local disk. everything run ok, but when I try to use "parsec" applications, I can not connect with this machine, somebody have experience with this?

Thanks.

 

[AlexLup]

I use ceph+Win10+ 750 ti and stream just fine with Parsec gaming by pointing it to the correct IP.

 

[Miguel Moreira]

I use ceph+Win10+ 750 ti and stream just fine with Parsec gaming by pointing it to the correct IP.

I can connect with parsec but It show's black screen only.

 

[AlexLup]

Hi,
Try to run this from the command line (admin) in the VM to unlock the computer..

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "$sessionid=((quser $env:USERNAME | select -Skip 1) -split '\s+')[2]; tscon $sessionid /dest:console" 2> UnlockErrors.log

 

[MikeWebb]

I had a win 10 vm with a GPU passed through along with a physical disk. I used sr-iov to pass a VF to the vm for north south and a Virtio Nic for east west. I also passed a dongle for keyboard and mouse. Assigned 4 cores and 8G memory. I didn't look into pinning CPUs and hugpages.

I used this VM as my desktop and played steam and blizzard games in 2K as well as running spice clients to connect to connect to other VM's the normal Proxmox way vi Firefox on the win10 vm. Performance of iops, networking, gaming and other VM's was very acceptable but that's all in the hardware used

I got the idea from tinkertry which used VMware.

I now have a dedicated win workstation and PVE cluster, but I can confirm that the method does work great. With these new high core count threadripper CPU's and the motherboards with good IOMMU grouping and ability to handle large and fast memory, It would be very viable and reasonably inexpensive to build a high performance AIO storage/hypervisor with built in 3D capable desktop

Proxmox is just Debian at the end of the day and everything I did is well documented.