Test 4
Had some free time today so figured I'd spend a few hours testing this idea properly. Loaded the machine up with 2x HD6450's, a single HD5450 GPU and the USB3 PCIe card. Connected up 3 TVs (one of which is through a Denon AVR).
Powered the host up and all 3 Windows 10 VMs. Configuration in the photos below is:
- Left TV: HD5450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM
- Middle TV: HD6450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM
- Right TV: HD6450, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM (although I did up this to 4 CPU/3GB RAM later when testing Plex)
- Middle monitor: ESXi host via onboard VGA port
So far so good!
Installed MPC-HC on each of the VMs and loaded up the Avatar Bluray 1:1 rip. Partial success, if you look closely the CPU usage of the two HD6450 based VMs is around 10% but the HD5450 is around 50%. I just can't get DXVA 1 or 2 to work properly on this graphics card when it's virtualised. Either way playback was very smooth, even on fast scenes.
VLC on the other hand seems to crash when I enable DXVA in the settings, otherwise this runs about 50% on all the VMs.
Close ups:
Next step was to test Plex which is my primary interface for playing tv/movies currently. This was a little bit of a pain to test as I have been using Mobile Mouse to control the VMs which as it turns out, you can't press the arrow keys on it to control Plex.
Solution was to open up a remote console on my laptop, set the focus within this and use the laptop keys to control it. Not a long term solution by any means but enough to get the tests complete.
Close ups:
I'd like to point out a few issues I had with Plex that I haven't had before, as two of the graphics cards connected directly to the TVs which I'm assuming don't support DTS audio. Plex was only able to play to these at around 4fps until I disabled the DTS option in the Plex preferences.
Another issue I have had is the VM with the USB3 PCIe card not powering up (no video output, no remote control output past VMWares post screen). This wouldn't happen every time and only happened once I installed a 3rd graphics card into the setup.
Overall I'm very happy how this has turned out, still wan't to test this USB PCIe issue some more before committing to using this in my setup.