Using Proxmox for a Internet cafe/esport setup

offerlam

Renowned Member
Dec 30, 2012
218
0
81
Denmark
Hi all,
I'm thinking of starting up a Internet Cafe/esport setup.
Instead of doing the traditional which is to buy X gameing mashines and set them up individually i was thinking of using a 3 server setup with Ceph and proxmox.

My idea is to have X virtual windows mashines running in proxmox with a 4Gb RAM grafichs card.
And have thin client stations at the side of the player.

I got two questions regarding this.

1.
Does Ceph support dedubplication? I may have allot of windows client virtual instancens running with almost the same install

2.
How well does proxmox mount virtuel grafic cards inside the vm? I have been looking at Nvidia and AMD, and i can see i will be useing AMD. Nvidia is way to expensive with thire yearly licens on grafics cards.
AMD is running with MxGPU which i will be using. Unless someone says that it a mistake :)

Does anyone have any experince with running computer games on the windows VM in proxmox with assigned virtuel grafic from a hardware shared grafics card in the server? Preferably AMD :)

Would HA migration be done transparently or are games so latency sensitive that they will disconnect or experience a short lag?

Thanks for your time!
 
Hi all,
I'm thinking of starting up a Internet Cafe/esport setup.
Instead of doing the traditional which is to buy X gameing mashines and set them up individually i was thinking of using a 3 server setup with Ceph and proxmox.

My idea is to have X virtual windows mashines running in proxmox with a 4Gb RAM grafichs card.
And have thin client stations at the side of the player.

I got two questions regarding this.

1.
Does Ceph support dedubplication? I may have allot of windows client virtual instancens running with almost the same install

2.
How well does proxmox mount virtuel grafic cards inside the vm? I have been looking at Nvidia and AMD, and i can see i will be useing AMD. Nvidia is way to expensive with thire yearly licens on grafics cards.
AMD is running with MxGPU which i will be using. Unless someone says that it a mistake :)

Does anyone have any experince with running computer games on the windows VM in proxmox with assigned virtuel grafic from a hardware shared grafics card in the server? Preferably AMD :)

Would HA migration be done transparently or are games so latency sensitive that they will disconnect or experience a short lag?

Thanks for your time!
How do you want to connect the the clients to the VMs with passed through GPU? I didn't found any solution, except for steam remote play, how to do that without too much lag or artifacts.
 
I was planing on using RDP. Each thin client would connect to the RDP session of a VM running Windows 10 with SR-IOV access to the grafics card
 
it seems to work here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRYrcmbr7Ao

and there are plenty of other articles stating the same.

But i would admit that I'am pusshing it :)

But with VDI/RDP and GRID/MxGPU and so on it should be possible.

Now i was thinking of just using VDI in hyper-v for this. But i would the dedub feature og ceph along with the HA for maximum uptime and so on..

And then there is the geeky part of it :)
 
I researched the same thing some weeks ago and came to the conclusion that there is no way to remotely use a VM for gaming. At least not in a way that fast competitive titles wouldn't suffer. You always got some additional annoying lag or you can see artifacts and the image quality will suffer.

Hi,

Right now I use a small Intel Atom without dedicated GPU to watch my media (emby, youtube) and browse the web from my TV.
But my new Proxmox server came with a Geforce 710 I'm not really using because I use the onboard GPU to be able to use VNC via IPMI.
So I thought it might be a good idea to setup a Win10 VM which could make use of the Geforce 710 and faster CPU so I could remote access the faster VM from my smartphone, tablet and the slow PC connected to my TV.

But I'm not sure how to do that so watching videos will be possible.

1.) I read that SPICE would be great for watching videos/gaming but it is not possible to PCIe-passthrough the GPU so the guest can't use hardware acceleration. I don't really need 3D performance because I'm not planning to game on it, but I would like to be able to use the hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding for media playback. Also I wasn't able to find out if it is possible for SPICE to use a GPU on the host system for acceleration.

2.) I could passthrough the GPU to the guest and use windows remote desktop or VNC to connect to the guest. That way the guest system could fully use the GPU but I've read both protocols aren't designed to display videos so it would stutter and display artefacts while playing back media.

3.) There is moonlight, RDNA, steam link and so on made for remote accessing videos and games but I don't want to stream single videos or games. I've got an emby server for media streaming and a GamingPC for remote Gaming. I want a access a complete desktop and not single services.

Isn't there any open source remote desktop server possible running from inside the VM with GPU hardware acceleration that is just streaming a non laggy and good quality video signal to another computer?

Short answer: not really.

Long answer: Streaming protocols you mention in 3.) can certainly be used for full-desktop streaming as well, so that's an option - though all of these services that I know of will most likely introduce compression artifacts or a slight delay. Probably your best shot though. Option 2.) will certainly not work, RDP and VNC are not cut out for the task. Option 1.) with SPICE will not support video acceleration with GPUs AFAIK, but there is an option to at least allow for better video streaming via an extension that can optionally be enabled in the VM's settings in PVE ("Spice Enhancements").
 

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