Proxmox with occasional Windows gaming?

marcosscriven

Member
Mar 6, 2021
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I essentially have no use for Windows or high powered GPUs, except for one thing: gaming in VR. I totally loved HL:Alex, and waiting for the next one (of that style - not necessarily a sequel).
I hate to see all the other components go to waste in between so considering one of two options:
  1. Setting up the machine as a Linux desktop with a KVM Windows VM with GPU pass through. The host would have a relatively weak GPU.
  2. Setting up Promox and having both Windows and my Linux desktops as VM - that way a third Linux VM can maintain things like Plex in a more stable way.
Can anyone comment on those two?
The next query is storage setup. I can have up to three nvme drives, and SATA SSDs (don’t want the noise of spinning disks on my desk).

[cross-post from Reddit - this forum seems more active]
 
So you don't want to game on your Proxmox host but just use your old hardware to run some services?

Keep in mind that a single GPU can't be used for multiple VMs. If you passthrough your GPU to the Windows VM your Linux desktops woudn't be able to use any hardware accellerated graphics. Even watching Youtube could be a problem on these Linux desktops if they don't got a dedicated GPU for decoding.
If you want several desktops on one host you need to passthrough several GPUs.
 
Sorry, I should state the hardware:

3900x
32 gb
1x512gb nvme
1x1tb nvme
rtx3080
gt 1030 (chosen as about the fastest single slot low profile card I could find)

my itx mobo has a spare 3rd nvm slot (on my x8x4x4 bifurcator), and unused sata ports.

im trying to decide between having the Linux desktop and windows desktop both virtualised on top of the proxmox guest. Or just go for Ubuntu desktop with a single windows vm managed in virt-manger.
 
I still don't get what you are trying to accomplish...

1.) Win10 for Gaming bare metal installed + Proxmox (with Linux + Win guests) bare metal installed so you can only run one of both at a time
2.) Proxmox bare metal installed with everything as a guest (including the gaming Win10)

That all doesn't make sense to me.

If I want a gaming machine (especially for VR where resolution and FPS is critical) I don't want to virtualize it because there is always a overhead and the games wouldn't be that responsive. Also I don't want to have services or VMs running in the background that could slow down my games.

And using a dualboot configuration would be fine for gaming but you wouldn't be able to use your services 24/7 and that is normally what you want. Also that gaming hardware don't sound really reliable/stable as a server and that host should be super energy inefficient if your are running hardware with 700+W just for streaming some Plex movies. For a server you don't want overclocked hardware and you want to sacrifice speed for enterprise features like ECC, redundancy and so on.
Its like if you want to pull a trailer. A reliable and slow but powerfull truck will do that much better than a speed optimized sports car.

If you got the money to buy a high end gaming pc for thousands of dollars, why are you not buying a additional homeserver? That only would cost you a fraction of that gaming PC and would be more reliable and efficient. And you could run your services 24/7 on a dedicated host and your gaming PC would be faster too because you can outsource tasks from your gaming pc to the server.
 
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Or go with option 3 xD
If you want the best gaming experience and services are less important, use hyper-v or vmware Workstation on your windows xD

There is even option 4 xD
You can passthrough the graphic card + the whole hard drive in proxmox to use it as your windows vm. To have it as guest and work on it.
And when you need max performance you can reboot and boot straight from your hard drive xD

Or option 5, use a cheap computer or raspberry or whatever for the services xD

However, you have tons of options if you are creative enough xD
 
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I don't judge, I just wanted to know what you are trying to accomplish so we can help.

Like Ramalama said, there are many option and some will be better than others depending on your priorities and needs.
 
Hey Marco. I managed to make 1 vm outputing the video to the Graphics card and to the monitor.
I can help you out w/ the knowledge that i got if you want, its not that hard.

Im only facing issues w/ some "glitching" on the VM itself while gaming, still finding the RCA (it could possibly be something ive done along the way, or either the new graphics card, as it wasnt doing it before)

My setup:

Gaming VM w/ I/O peripherals, Onboard Audio & Graphics card (3060)
Booting from an SSD directly passed-trought to the VM. when i want full performance i just go w/ booting that disk directly

Cheers

Marco
 

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