GPU Sharing for VM's

[Underscore]

Heyo!
Don't know if this one should go in the workbench section or not, but I'll try here.

Looking at building a new VM/server box and trying to make it more compact, meaning I'd prefer to only shove one GPU in there. As such I was wondering if any GPU's out there, AMD or NVIDIA (or hell, even intel Xe) had the capability to do resource sharing between multiple VM's, and if so, which cards do have that capability?

Is it a software limitation within the driver so that every card could in theory do it or is it a hardware limitation?
Does only data center oriented cards (like the Teslas or the Quadros) have the functionallity enabled or is there a way to enable it on normal consumer cards as well?

Thanks for the read!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Only data center gpus can do this, and you normally need a pretty big software setup to use this. Its software limited to the card, they use the same dies. There have been some unlocks, but there pretty rare.

 

But if you want a compact multiuser pc, you probably don't need multiple vms anyways. THere is software like aster that can have multiple users on one gpu.

 

Id really suggest just getting 2 small pcs or laptop. Then there is much less hassle and issues to deal with.

[Underscore]

Hmm, ok. Shame.

It's not for multiple users, it would litteraly be for multiple VM's to be able to run at the same time on my server box. Have a few VM's that do different things that I spin up from time to time and would like to, if possible, in the next iteration of my setup to not have to power down a VM if I want to use a different one for 10 minutes to do something just because they share the same GPU.

What exactly do you mean with "needing a pretty big software setup"? Big software setup for sharing the GPU resources or for doing the multiple VM's? Because if it's for the VM's I already got that covered using either unraid or freenas. If you mean something else I'd love to hear about it!

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Underscore said:

Hmm, ok. Shame.

It's not for multiple users, it would litteraly be for multiple VM's to be able to run at the same time on my server box. Have a few VM's that do different things that I spin up from time to time and would like to, if possible, in the next iteration of my setup to not have to power down a VM if I want to use a different one for 10 minutes to do something just because they share the same GPU.

What exactly do you mean with "needing a pretty big software setup"? Big software setup for sharing the GPU resources or for doing the multiple VM's? Because if it's for the VM's I already got that covered using either unraid or freenas. If you mean something else I'd love to hear about it!

what are the vms in the server doing? Normally just use a virtual gpu for a server, and no real gpu is needed.

 

Or you can do solutions where the gpu is shared between the between the vms in software, and no datacenter vm is needed.

 

In order to use virtual gpus, at least for clients, you need pretty specifc versions of hypervisors and software, and normally thousands in licensing. Freenas is pretty limited for vms in general, and unraid isn't made for these datacenter gpus. 

[Underscore]

Only reason for the GPU is to "speed up" the visuals on the VM's as well as some programs need directX to run and without a dedicated GPU (only other option I've tried is integrated graphics) the performance is spotty or just not working.

The VM's serve different purposes, I've got a linux VM that I use mostly for testing purposes, then I've got a Windows 7 VM mostly centered around running software that is no longer updated or playing some older games that do not run on Win 10, mainly because they are directX 9 only.

Don't know if virtual GPU's or GPU sharing in software like you are mentioning can help me out in these use cases. Would be sweet if possible!