Physical Access to VMs

[iadityaharsh]

Can something like this be achieved with Proxmox?

Basic Idea:
1) One Mirror Pool with 3 ZVols, each containing a Windows 11 VM

2) Pass through 3 Nvidia A4000 to these three VMs respectively as the GPU

3) Output the VM i.e., Windows on an external Monitor connected to these GPUs

Plan to run 3 Windows machine on a single Proxmox Server.

Specs:
AMD Epyc 7402P (24C/48T)
Supermicro H12SSL-I
128GB DDR4 3200 MT/s ECC RDIMM

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-NTLgBeDehSY-QO1EMLpy_1vDoohGqFu/view?usp=drivesdk

 

[LnxBil]

Can something like this be achieved with Proxmox?

I don't see why not.

 

[iadityaharsh]

I don't see why not.

Any special requirements to pass through USB keyboard and mouse and to pass through GPU

 

[Dunuin]

Best would be to get three USB controller PCIe cards and passthrough one of them to each VM too. That way USB is more reliable, faster and anything plugged into these cards will automatically end up as a device inside the VM without needing to passthrough individual USB devices.
But simple USB passthrough might be fine if you just want to use a mouse/keyboard that doesn't need great latency or throughput.

 

[iadityaharsh]

Best would be to get three USB controller PCIe cards and passthrough one of them to each VM too. That way USB is more reliable, faster and anything plugged into these cards will automatically end up as a device inside the VM without needing to passthrough individual USB devices.
But simple USB passthrough might be fine if you just want to use a mouse/keyboard that doesn't need great latency or throughput.

Ideally I'd do that but even though my Motherboard has 5 PCIe Gen4 x16 Slots and 2 PCIe Gen4 x8 slots, I'll be adding 3 Nvidia A4000 which will each consume 3 x16 slots, 1 Asus Hyper M.2 Gen4 Card for 4 M.2 NVMe drives (for OS and Applications), leaving me with 3 slots for which 1 x8 will be used by a Intel Dual 10 gig NIC and I donot want to waste precious x16 slot on some USB Expansion Card.

For GPU Passthrough of A4000 do I need to tweak some things inside Proxmox?

 

[Dunuin]

1 Asus Hyper M.2 Gen4 Card for 4 M.2 NVMe drives (for OS and Applications)

Make sure to buy enterprise grade SSDs in case you want to use ZFS. There aren't much M.2 options if you don't use M.2 to U.2 adapters.
If you want PCIe 4.0 there are basically only two options: Samsung PM9A3 and Micron 7400 PRO/MAX.

For GPU Passthrough of A4000 do I need to tweak some things inside Proxmox?

You should follow this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough

And if you are lucky the onboard USB controllers got their own IOMMU group. In that case you could also passthrough some of them.

 

[iadityaharsh]

You should follow this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough

And if you are lucky the onboard USB controllers got their own IOMMU group. In that case you could also passthrough some of them.

I've been using TrueNAS Core for a long time and I've seen the guides for TrueNAS Scale, there GPU passthrough is as simple as isolating the GPU from settings and bam I've a new VM with allocated GPU.

The only issue is, that there is no other way to passthrough USB except for using a PCIEe Expansion Card for each VM and that is the reason why I leaned towards Proxmox, but I think it'll some extra work to do for proper configuration.

 

[Dunuin]

Big difference between PVE and TrueNAS is that PVE is a full Linux distribution and TrueNAS is just an appliance. So you got much more freedom with PVE because you are not just limited to stuff that the GUI allows you to do. But this also comes with more complexity so its harder to setup.

 

[LnxBil]

I've been using TrueNAS Core for a long time and I've seen the guides for TrueNAS Scale, there GPU passthrough is as simple as isolating the GPU from settings and bam I've a new VM with allocated GPU.

With proper hardware, it's just selecting passthrough via the GUI and "bam" it works :-D

 

[iadityaharsh]

With proper hardware, it's just selecting passthrough via the GUI and "bam" it works :-D

What kind of hardware, please enlighten me?
I'm quite new to Proxmox

 

[Docop2]

Any hrdw do. Disconnect internet, install proxmox 7.1 , and all passthrough do work fine. i run 3 quadro over a nuc9 and one in a tb case. Mouse is ok via gui of prox, but anything else, get an highpoint usb card.

 

[LnxBil]

What kind of hardware, please enlighten me?

hardware that works in your setup (you can only answer that). Yours is new, so you should be golden.