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How feasible would it be to use one computer as a combined server/desktop with virtualization? (lemmy.starless.one)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I currently have a 24/7 linux old-office-PC-turned-server for self-hosting, and a desktop for mostly programming and playing games (linux as a host + a windows VM with a passed-through GPU). The server's i5-3330 is usually at ~10-15% usage.

Here's the actual idea: what if, instead of having a separate server and desktop, I had one beefy computer that'd run 24/7 acting as a server and just spun up a linux or windows VM when I needed a desktop? GPUs and USB stuff would be passed through, and I could buy a PCIe SATA or NVMe controller I could also passthrough to not have to worry about virtualized disk overhead.

I'm almost certain I could make this work, but I wonder if it's even worth it - would it consume less power? What about damage to the components from staying powered 24/7? It'd certainly be faster accessing a NAS without the whole "Network-Attached" part, and powering on the desktop for remote access could just be a command over SSH instead of some convoluted remote WoL that I haven't bothered setting up yet.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Edit 2 months later: Just bought a 7950X3D and use the 3D V-cache half of it as a virtualized desktop with the other cores used for running the host and other VMs. Works perfectly when passing through a dedicated GPU, but iGPU passthrough is very difficult if not impossible since I couldn't manage it.

Edit even later-er: iGPU passthrough is possible on ryzen 7000 after all, everything works great now.

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

VMware workstation works great. Just install Windows or linux on the box, workstation, and fire up all the VMs you could dream of, while using the PC as a normal PC.

But just know that any time you need to reboot your PC PC you need to reboot your server, which sucks. It's much better to just keep the old office PC. That old i5 uses so little power at idle vs a modern CPU being perpetually kept awake.

[–] vegetaaaaaaa 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

VMWare Workstation is a Type 2 hypervisor and the performance is horrible.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can't find any benchmarks comparing workstation to ESXi. But for work we spend most of our time in type 2 hypervisors and performance is just fine. Just make sure you're not using the Windows Hypervisor Platform because that does have a huge performance penalty. Considering OP uses an old i5 I'm sure a modern CPU would handle the load just fine.

But importantly workstation has something ESXi doesn't, 3D Acceleration. And if you're doing anything graphical it makes a huge difference.

[–] vegetaaaaaaa 1 points 2 years ago

KVM/libvirt (type 1) blows VMWare Workstation out of the water, performance-wise (and license cost-wise since it's FOSS). I don't have benchmarks at hand, but expect something in the order of 20% I/O-wise, 10% CPU-wise, which quickly adds up. RAM usage impact should be negligible. Of course it depends on the workload, CPU-bound workloads will suffer less, but a lot of workloads are I/O-bound (databases for example).

VMWare reportedly has the best 3D acceleration support, yes. But it doesn't support hardware passthrough (which type 1 hypervisors do).

Of course if you're in Windows-land you don't have much choice (is Hyper-V slower than Workstation? Shouldn't be - but hey it's a microsoft product :) )