Recomended way using GPU in Proxmox

M

marcello11

New Member
Sep 4, 2024
5
0
1
Hello everyone.
I'm new to Proxmox and I'm looking for a recommendation on how to install Nvidia drivers, or best practices for using GPU in Proxmox. Now the GPU fans are not controlled and are running at 60%. I tried, it can go to idle on windows, so I guess it should work here too. My question would be, is it better to install all drivers on the host or better to control from a VM with pass through? If I pass the GPU to the VM, then other VMs or containers can access it?
My plan in the future is to use multiple K8S clusters and pass the GPU to them. Using small LLMs and Jellifyn.

Thank you :)
 
Hello marcello11! First of all, which Nvidia graphics card do you have? That makes a big difference (see below).

The Proxmox VE documentation says the following:
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.
Click to expand...

So if you want to use the GPU in multiple VMs at the same time, PCIe passthrough is not the best solution.

If you have a professional/datacenter Nvidia GPU you can instead use Nvidia vGPU (see PVE docs and PVE wiki) to use a single GPU in multiple VMs at the same time.

Another possibility would be to use VirGL for host offloading. 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.

Last but not least, you can always buy multiple GPUs and use PCIe passthrough for each of them, if that's also an option.
 
Last edited:
Hello Laurențiu!

Thank you for your comment :) Currently i have only one GTX 1650 Super card. But If I understand well , with this card ,only the first and last option could be possible for me.
 
You're welcome! :) Yes, with that GPU you can either do GPU passthrough (but you can only use it in multiple VMs if you have multiple GPUs), or try to use VirGL. Good luck!
 
One more thing: what I explained above is true for VMs. However, multiple LXC containers can use the same GPU, so if LXC containers are all you need, you can share your current GPU between multiple containers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: marcello11
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom