looking to do 2 gamers one cpu without unraid

[Turtleinahafshel]

is is possible to do 2 gamers one cpu with a unraid alternative. and if that is possible which is the best and is there a way to split a gpus performance between the two vms

[Electronics Wizardy]

Well unraid is just linux, so almost any linux distro will work fine(ubuntu, centos, debian, fedora)

 

You can do it on esxi, but there is no reason to for your use, its just more of a pain to use for someone knew and has some support issues with gtx cards.

 

You can also do it in server2016 with device passthrough, but that licence stats at around 400 bucks

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, Turtleinahafshel said:

is is possible to do 2 gamers one cpu with a unraid alternative. and if that is possible which is the best and is there a way to split a gpus performance between the two vms

You cannot "split the load" of the GPU between 2 VM's using free or commercially available software.

 

Each VM needs it's own dedicated GPU that is "passed" to the VM by the host machine. The host machine also needs it's own dedicated GPU (but the host machine can use an iGPU in the case of, say, an i5 or i7).

 

As for the VM software itself, you can use:

KVM via Linux

Windows Hyper-V

ESXi

unRAID

 

I do not believe VirtualBox supports Device Passthrough. There may be additional options, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.

[Pixel5]

14 hours ago, Turtleinahafshel said:

is is possible to do 2 gamers one cpu with a unraid alternative. and if that is possible which is the best and is there a way to split a gpus performance between the two vms

the key thing here is its 1 CPU not one GPU, you will still need a GPU for each player.

[LiMz]

18 hours ago, Turtleinahafshel said:

is is possible to do 2 gamers one cpu with a unraid alternative. and if that is possible which is the best and is there a way to split a gpus performance between the two vms

Many Linux Distro's with KVM should allow this.

 

Check that your hardware supports VT-x AND VT-d

 

you will need IOMMU pass through for your Guest OS's to have access to the GPUs. Yes GPUs (plural).

 

You need to be a little comfortable with the unix command line interface aswell.

 

PROXMOX is a free and open source Hypervisor that may work.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough

 

Give it a shot!

 

[samiscool51]

On 21/03/2017 at 6:34 AM, dalekphalm said:

I do not believe VirtualBox supports Device Passthrough

many wish it does, because it's open source and something like device passthrough requires closed-source code, it can't use it

the only one i know that could do something like this is VMwares vSphere Hypervisor which is free

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor.html

only problem, since it's not based in linux it requires drivers much like windows, if the manufacturer doesn't provide drivers for the opereating system, it can't use that device

people like Nvidia have drivers for some of their products for vSphere but it depends on the manufacturer as many don't provide any at all....

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

many wish it does, because it's open source and something like device passthrough requires closed-source code, it can't use it

Virtual box supports pcie passthrough on linux, but why would you use virtual box, kvm is better.

 

You can do pcie passthrough completly opensource.

[samiscool51]

14 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Virtual box supports pcie passthrough on linux,

linux is open source, of cource it would have support for it on an open source opereating system

for opereating systems like windows and OSX it doesn't

[Electronics Wizardy]

50 minutes ago, samiscool51 said:

linux is open source, of cource it would have support for it on an open source opereating system

for opereating systems like windows and OSX it doesn't

windows supports device passthrough in 2016

[samiscool51]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

windows supports device passthrough in 2016

with supported programs, virtualbox isn't one of them

in fact, hyper-v on win10 and server2016 are the only one's that can do that

 

[Verrm]

Go KVM, Proxmox or Docker. Go watch Linus's videos on how he did that. Having one CPU is not an issue. VMs use virtual CPUs anyway. No Probs.

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, Verrm said:

Go KVM, Proxmox or Docker. Go watch Linus's videos on how he did that. Having one CPU is not an issue. VMs use virtual CPUs anyway. No Probs.

Whether you have "one CPU" or not is immaterial. It's the core count that matters with VM's. A single 8-core CPU is worth just as much as dual 4-core CPU's - assuming all else is equal.

 

Besides in these types of gamer VM's, PCIe device passthrough and a single GPU for each "computer" is the important factor.