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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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[–] 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 :) )