Selfhosted

40256 readers

1132 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

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

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

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Nibodhika 4 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't do that if you have the hardware to keep things separated but it's because of what I run on my server. You need to take into consideration that besides CPU/GPU usage a server's heavy load will be on Network and Disks, so while the system looks like it's not doing much, it might be doing a lot of Io operations. The thing with that is that both your disks and your network have a limited capacity, so if you're trying to play a game you might get longer load screens and higher ping that you would with one machine for each.

That being said it vastly depends on what you're running on the server, but higher pings and lower fps are a given since now you'll have more processes running on the background, so for games that are CPU bottlenecked it will be a massive hit.