Advice for building a home server/workstation

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disasterisk

New Member
Dec 4, 2021
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Hello,

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to building servers so please be patient :)

Recently I decided to build a server which would be used for storage, but also as a workstation where I would have multiple virtual machines for testing/gaming/audio production. After some research it seems that Proxmox has what I need. I was thinking of getting a 12th gen Intel i7 or one of the top end AMD Ryzens with an integrated GPU for general use + an additional NVIDIA gpu (at least a 1660) which I would passthrough to a Windows VM for gaming and perhaps another AMD GPU if I ever needed it for some tasks. I would also virtualize OpenMediaVault for NAS functionality. I would also fit in as much RAM and storage as possible with a small boot SSD for Proxmox.

Now, as I understood it, if I assign a GPU for passthrough to a specific VM, then I can't use it in any other VM, even if I shut the said VM down first? Am I wrong?
Please note I'm very unfamiliar with Linux and all this would be a learning experience for me as well.

Also, I only plan on having a couple of VMs running continuously (such as OpenMediaVault) while I would use others like normal computers shutting them down when not in use.
I also want to use one of the VMs for audio recording/production so I would plug audio interfaces and other such devices into the machine. Is that viable?

Any suggestions and corrections of my idea are much appreciated.
I am also visually impaired so in case Proxmox's interface turns out to be inaccessible I was planning on using the web interface from my laptop.

Thanks in advance!
 

zunder1990

Active Member
Nov 15, 2012
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Yes you can share the GPU between more than one VM. It is not passthrough but instead it is using GPU-P.

Downsides of GPU-P
Documentation is thin
does not work with older GPU(your 1660 will work, I am using the same one under hyper-v and GPU-P
Diver version matters alot, host and vm need same driver files

Here is a howto about it

Then setup I have is two windows 10 VMs running on windows 10 hyper-v host.
 

MBastian

Active Member
Jul 17, 2016
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Düsseldorf, Germany
Yes you can share the GPU between more than one VM. It is not passthrough but instead it is using GPU-P.
I've only skimmed through the video but it seems to center around the NVIDIA vGPU hack from dualcoder. The downside of vGPU is that you have to partition your GPU for each VM. GPU-P on Windows Hyper-V is much more flexible and allows overbooking and such. A GTX 1650 or 1660 only has 4GB or 6GB of VRAM which is not ideal as you'd have to partition it to run two VMs. Obviously it gets worse when you want to run more VMs.

Edit: Corrected a mistake
 
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disasterisk

New Member
Dec 4, 2021
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Thanks for all your replies. I suppose GPU-P wouldn't work for me as I would use that GPU for gaming so I need all that it can give. I was planning on using the integrated GPU for all other VMs or perhaps a secondary GPU if I can afford it.
I would like to use this machine for storage and for playing around with different operating systems.

Now, for storage functionality - I was thinking of using virtualized OpenMediaVault but from what I've found Proxmox also has NAS capability. I want to use ZFS as my filesystem. Is there any benefit of using a separate VM for NAS functionality rather than Proxmox? Also, is it better to passthrough the harddrives to the NAS VM or not? I've found an article that says HDD passthrough is a bad idea. Can someone explain this better or point me in the right direction?

Thanks for the replies and sorry for infrequent posting.