Replacing all or many computers in your home with a virtual machine box

[VintageGamer]

Has anyone replaced all or many of their computers in their house with a single virtual machine hosting solution such as what was shown in this video? What was your experience and would you recommend this for users who are gaming, digital art and photo editing, blender renderings, and hosting a Minecraft server?

 

THIS Replaced Every PC in my House!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzeZCZluJ0

[jaslion]

4 minutes ago, VintageGamer said:

Has anyone replaced all or many of their computers in their house with a single virtual machine hosting solution such as what was shown in this video? What was your experience and would you recommend this for users who are gaming, digital art and photo editing, blender renderings, and hosting a Minecraft server?

 

THIS Replaced Every PC in my House!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzeZCZluJ0

Thing is it's often just cheaper to have individual computers than do this. Most schools however do this kinda setup as a cost saving measure.

[steelo]

16 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Thing is it's often just cheaper to have individual computers than do this. Most schools however do this kinda setup as a cost saving measure.

Yeah, I don't see how this would be cost effective at all. It is a neat concept, but I can see it being a royal pita too.

 

I guess you could use cheap $30 rpi's and parsec into the main pc from any room, but only 1 user would be able to use it at a time.

[jaslion]

Just now, steelo said:

Yeah, I don't see how this would be cost effective at all. It is a neat concept, but I can see it being a royal pita.

The times this is done and cost effective is when it's for lets say 16 people. All of those run a thin client system that is maybe 150$ a pop. Then all of those people connect to a central computer that is beefed up with a 8 core xeon or something costing about 2500$.

 

This would be cheaper as you would still need a central computer for the employees or students anyways but now that system is integrated and the desktops are cheaper. Most schools enter a service contract for this and they pay 800$ a piece for a computer so this is a pretty nice deal for them + it's easily scalable.

[VintageGamer]

I agree with jaslion. My cost analysis for what I want to do at my hose point to this being cheaper as a consolidated solution instead of dedicated machines. The point of this project is to consolidate the hardware to one high end machine since the majority of the daily use is not high performance use that is not cost effective to have high end equipment at each location. The majority of the use on this would be two users with Internet, email and office document work while a blender occasionally runs in the background, which does not make sense to have high end graphics cards and underutilized CPU cores in each system. One of these users also likes their existing all in one desktop computer that does not have a dedicated GPU which they would use for everyday activities then connect to the virtual machine with a GPU when needed for their GPU intensive work. Another benefit to this is setting up a virtual machine with an RTX3090 as a dedicated rendering server, rendering VM or a gaming VM since I am the only gamer in the house and the rendering is not done every day. I am looking at high core count CPUs to setup a NAS, ubuntu server, windows server and two Windows 10 desktops with dedicated GPUs and then at least one other Windows 10 desktop without a dedicated GPU to run on this box. Heat generation and space in my server and network room is also a concern, and less boxes in my server room would be a big benefit on cooling costs. It is also appearing to have reduced noise in my office by moving the computer to a different room. Another benefit to this is that I can then run high performance use cases Linux or Windows in locations that currently do not have them using low power thin clients, such as my home theater, lounge, my yard with a tablet or using my older laptop without a dedicated GPU as a gaming laptop using Parsec or other remote options. We also have a five year old Apple laptop which would benefit from having the access to the virtual machines. I would also like to have all machines in the house running on an SSD pool for quick performance, then point to a NAS that has an SSD pool for commonly access files without caching and NAS with a hard drive pool for archive storage that does not require SSD caching. having all systems running off a shared SSD drive pool will allow for redundancy, upgrading and replacing drives. I already have a separate backup solution for my primary backup which will remain separate from this box and I also am setting up a remote backup solution for secondary, offsite backup.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 hours ago, VintageGamer said:

I agree with jaslion. My cost analysis for what I want to do at my hose point to this being cheaper as a consolidated solution instead of dedicated machines. The point of this project is to consolidate the hardware to one high end machine since the majority of the daily use is not high performance use that is not cost effective to have high end equipment at each location. The majority of the use on this would be two users with Internet, email and office document work while a blender occasionally runs in the background, which does not make sense to have high end graphics cards and underutilized CPU cores in each system. One of these users also likes their existing all in one desktop computer that does not have a dedicated GPU which they would use for everyday activities then connect to the virtual machine with a GPU when needed for their GPU intensive work. Another benefit to this is setting up a virtual machine with an RTX3090 as a dedicated rendering server, rendering VM or a gaming VM since I am the only gamer in the house and the rendering is not done every day. I am looking at high core count CPUs to setup a NAS, ubuntu server, windows server and two Windows 10 desktops with dedicated GPUs and then at least one other Windows 10 desktop without a dedicated GPU to run on this box. Heat generation and space in my server and network room is also a concern, and less boxes in my server room would be a big benefit on cooling costs. It is also appearing to have reduced noise in my office by moving the computer to a different room. Another benefit to this is that I can then run high performance use cases Linux or Windows in locations that currently do not have them using low power thin clients, such as my home theater, lounge, my yard with a tablet or using my older laptop without a dedicated GPU as a gaming laptop using Parsec or other remote options. We also have a five year old Apple laptop which would benefit from having the access to the virtual machines. I would also like to have all machines in the house running on an SSD pool for quick performance, then point to a NAS that has an SSD pool for commonly access files without caching and NAS with a hard drive pool for archive storage that does not require SSD caching. having all systems running off a shared SSD drive pool will allow for redundancy, upgrading and replacing drives. I already have a separate backup solution for my primary backup which will remain separate from this box and I also am setting up a remote backup solution for secondary, offsite backup.

 

For this use case, Id probably just have lower end desktop or laptops for day to day basic use, do reason to do this remotly, makes it much simpler to setup.

 

Anouther thing is remote desktop has some latency, so that probalby not gonna be great, esp for gaming. 

 

You can also run multiple users on one gpu with programs like aster, so id try giving that a shot.

 

 

[Jarsky]

I have a single machine that replaced all my previous servers. 

I had a Dell R610 w/ 2 x X5650's 64GB Ram, 2 x Dell R710 w/ 2 x X5650's 64GB Ram and 1 Custom storage server w/ 2 x X5650's 48GB Ram. 

I replaced them all with a Single Ryzen9 based server and virtualised all my services into VM's and Docker containers. 

 

As for my desktops and htpc's though they're still physical machines. 

It's better supported, and less complexity when I have an issue. 

In the event of a hardware/OS failure, I also don't take down every computer in my house.