For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:
- a few gaming VMs
- a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
- an LLM server
- a Stable Diffusion server
- media server
Just to name a few possibilities…
Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.
So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?
I’ve recently tried to do that using sunsine and different linux gaming distros and it was awful, the VM was working great for a few minutes and then suddenly crashes and I have to hard stop it.
All the people that I’ve seen talking about it on the internet are using Windows VMs so I guess that I’m doing something wrong or the only way to do it is through a Windows VM, which I’ll not even try.
I run a gaming Linux VM on my server and it works fine.
Could you explain how? I’m pretty lost in this situation…
Hey, sorry I didn’t reply until now but life has been pretty hectic and I also kinda borked my streaming VM right at the same time as I wrote that. I ran Nobara Linux for a while with KDE on Xorg and it actually worked pretty well. Then I decided I wanted to give Bazzite a try but I didn’t like the whole immutable thing. I went back to Nobara just to find that Steam Remote Play straight up didn’t work and I couldn’t know if I had failed to set up something properly or Valve just broke it while I was “away”. A couple of days ago I decided to just abandon Remote Play for the time being and deployed Games on Whales and it seems very promising so far. Much easier than fiddling with VM:s and GPU passthrough and Sunshine/Moonlight has never failed me.
No worries, LOL we followed exactly the same steps with the same problems, in fact, I was procrastinating documenting my problems in my Logseq and I think I’ll copy your explanation because it’s exactly my case in everything xd thanks ^^
Are you running this with something like libvirtd/qemu? If so, VFIO configurations can get pretty complex. Random crashes seem like MSI interrupt issues (or you’ve allocated too much RAM to the guest). Or it could be GPU reset issues that would also occur on the (Linux) host, a newer kernel and Mesa version in the guest may help.
Setting on the kernel commandline for the host to workaround MSR interrupt crashes:
If you’re running on a Windows host or with something like Virtualbox (assuming GPU passthrough is supported by these), YMMV but I wouldn’t expect good results.
I’m using Proxmox with an NVIDIA 1050 GPU that I was passing through to another VM for jellyfin transcoding in docker (I don’t need it anymore), because of that I thought that the drivers were set up correctly.
The guest was Bazzite with 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM, I was not even gaming, just login on steam and updating the system and I had sudden crashes with Bazzite only using 1 GB on the Summary…
Ah Nvidia. Bazzite uses Wayland I believe since it uses the same gamescope session as SteamOS (unless something has changed recently). While it may be possible to get it working, I’d expect a much better time with an AMD card.
A traditional distribution may be a better bet with Nvidia for now.
Thanks, I’ve also tried to change the autologin with x11 with no success, I’ll try with nobara, but I really liked the console-like features