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Threadripper VM Server to Multi-Steam Link TVs?

Is it possible to set up a Threadripper system with multiple video cards and assign each of the cards out to a VM for use over multiple steam links to separate TVs throughout the house?

 

The use case here is that I can provide a HTPC experience to every TV in my house on a single system that I would also use as my main system for gaming/productivity.

 

The plan would to have 2x 2 Core VMs for my living room & bed room connected via Steam Link (Plex, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, ect), 1x 4 Core VM for my entertainment room connected via Steam Link (Steam games, Plex, Neflix, ect), and 8-Core dedicated to my personal office which would be directly connected to the server box.

 

Any blockers or challenges I should be aware of?

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Would you be using all at the same time? 

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Yes this can work, I'd pilot it with what you have now or some cheap used parts on ebay before sinking significant amounts of money in to it. They key things to check is ease of use and stability.

 

Linus did a video on this using steam link so I'd go check that out and keep an eye out in particular for the bad things, the video does over sell the idea.

 

Edit:

I have tried this out myself and decided it was not a good idea.

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Yeah I would have to agree with leadeater here, and say make sure you are certain you want to try it out and will even work, before sinking the money on a whole new system specifically for this use case. Alternatively, I use a small intel compute stick for my HTPC (running plex and the like), which works well enough for my needs and can pickup for around a hundred and so.

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PCI-E Passthrough with Ryzen is REALLY janky atm, let alone Threadripper.

 

Considering the newest Bios for Threadripper is AGESA1003a i wouldn't risk the money and wait until the platform matured.

 

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9 hours ago, Taldren said:

Is it possible to set up a Threadripper system with multiple video cards and assign each of the cards out to a VM for use over multiple steam links to separate TVs throughout the house?

 

The use case here is that I can provide a HTPC experience to every TV in my house on a single system that I would also use as my main system for gaming/productivity.

 

The plan would to have 2x 2 Core VMs for my living room & bed room connected via Steam Link (Plex, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, ect), 1x 4 Core VM for my entertainment room connected via Steam Link (Steam games, Plex, Neflix, ect), and 8-Core dedicated to my personal office which would be directly connected to the server box.

 

Any blockers or challenges I should be aware of?

Please keep in mind that Steam Link provides a pretty terrible HTPC experience.

 

It does gaming quite well, if you want to stream games off of another PC, but the rest of the HTPC experience: Watching streaming apps/sites, watching local movies, etc - is going to be very subpar.

 

If you're gonna use Steam In-Home streaming for an HTPC, I would suggest you're better off using full-blown low-end PC's instead of SteamLink's. You'll be able to install Plex or Kodi or some other HTPC Front-End that will be by far more user friendly.

 

You can "stream" Kodi (and probably Plex) over Steam In-Home streaming on the SteamLink by adding it to Steam as a Non-Steam App, but it's janky as fuck and why are you streaming a stream? Total waste of internal bandwidth and wasted processing power on the VM.

 

Hell, you'd be better off doing SteamLink + a Roku/Chromecast/Apple TV/Android box.

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On 8/15/2017 at 2:59 PM, TheCherryKing said:

You're better off going with Skylake-SP until the AMD platform matures.

Don't want to spend an extra grand for the extra cores with less PCIe lanes for the 4 video cards dedicated to the 4 individual VMs.

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You could look into the Nvidia Shield for game streaming, it runs android TV so has all your htpc apps like plex, netflix etc and the gamestream works pretty well, even lets you stream in 4k, even if your computer monitor isn't 4k. 

 

It also comes with a remote and a controller now too. And you can use the newer Xbox one controllers if you prefer. 

 

But I would think you would need a dedicated gigabit LAN port for each of the VMs of sharing a 10GB Ethernet into a 10GB switch using 1GbE to the rest of the clients. 

 

The limitation here is that you will have to use nvidia GPUs on all your VMs otherwise it won't work. 

 

But I would echo others concerns about the maturity of threadripper at the moment. I don't think it will have as many problems as Ryzen did at launch but I would maybe wait until the chips start hitting general consumers and people start testing it. I assume that there will be a lot of testing and benchmarking coming with virtualisation in these processors in the coming weeks and months.

 

But it certainly is a great time to be a PC enthusiast at the moment with genuine competition in the market again. 

 

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Look into using unraid; at least once the whole risen virtualization stuff gets sorted out. 

 

Also, instead of steam link, look into parsec.tv; you can set up some cheap raspberry pi's and stream in home, as well as from a mobile computer / android device when out and about!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys, sorry I'm so late, but your idea gave me an idea, so I made a video about it.  Here is Parsec Streaming to a Raspberry Pi 3.  One of the videos I'm going to make is a bit of a VFIO setup using multiple GPU's streaming to multiple Pi's.  I don't have a huge budget but I'll do what I can.  Maybe two GPU's and 2 Pi3's.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 8/28/2017 at 8:57 PM, JamesStringer said:

Hey guys, sorry I'm so late, but your idea gave me an idea, so I made a video about it.  Here is Parsec Streaming to a Raspberry Pi 3.  One of the videos I'm going to make is a bit of a VFIO setup using multiple GPU's streaming to multiple Pi's.  I don't have a huge budget but I'll do what I can.  Maybe two GPU's and 2 Pi3's.

 

 

The whole login is sort of a deal breaker for me. I have dedicated Cat7 runs between my server room and each TV in my house ... so I'd rather have something that doesn't even touch the net for 1) Security and 2) Least amount of input lag as possible.

 

What I need, basically, is some sort of Displayport KVM over IP that I can associate to a particular VM.

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