VM's and Gaming. Specifically World of Warcraft

[Marlberg]

I have three fairly nice (but beginning to be dated) gaming rigs and that works for my wife my daughter and myself.  However we recently acquired several (4 to be exact ) new long term temporary guests in my home (ranging in age from 4 to 30) who also would like to play video games with us.  Being a gregarious and generous guy I have thoughts on getting these new members of the household set up with their own gaming systems but 4 separate new machines on a network that already consists of 25ish devices three of which are multiple nic servers running 10GBe copper/1gbe (Broadcom 2x2 2port 10GBe 2port 1gbe nics) hardware to multiple DELL PowerConnect 5548p switches on a VLAN on a separate subnet from my normal home network is going to be fairly resource expensive not to mention the cost of 4 ~$1.5k gaming rigs.  So what I thought about was adding two midrange low profile gpu's to two separate servers I have running Proxmox (total of 4 gpu's) and then using PCIe passthrough on the gpu's to serve 4 inexpensive thin clients (basically keyboard mouse and displayport with an ethernet connection) and set up two vm's (each server has 1.5TB of ddr3 ram installed (dell poweredge 16 bay r820's 4x12 core E5-4657v2's).

Since I already have all of the above mentioned items (sans the gpu's) I thought why not put that to good use and save a few dollars on gaming hardware and vm the windows instances necessary to run World of Warcraft (and any other games) and then attach the thin clients to the server via cat6a ethernet and run the games that way?  

So then first question I have is:

Is this possible?
 

Second question I have is:

Is it feasible?

And third question I have is:

Best methods to go about this?

   

[Electronics Wizardy]

Check that pcie passthough works on there, but it should work.

 

Your gonna have a lot more issues this way. Id just get cheap desktops here if it was me, you don't need 1.5k desktops, just a old optiplex for those gpus, should be like $300 usd or less a system.

 

Proxmox isn't made for VDI uses, so you need to use something like parsec to run the thin clients.

 

If you really want to do the vms, id test that pcie passthrough works first, then test how the latency is. What do you plan on using for thin clients?

[Marlberg]

As far as the passthrough goes it should from what else I have read so far but that might just be theory and optimism.

 

What are some of the issues you believe would be relevant?  Not calling you out. Asking sincerely because I don't know having never tried anything like this before.  All of my gpu passthrough and virtual machine experience is the standard virtualization kind of thing.  Web servers database servers Domain Controllers application and file servers virtualized etc.

Parsec hmmm?  Looks similar to MS Teams but without all of the business side bloat.  Nice!  I can still run that on a windows 10 Pro vm running on Proxmox. 

as far as my thin clients I was looking at something like this:

https://www.newegg.com/hp-2dh78at-aba/p/0A5-0074-000J8

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, Marlberg said:

As far as the passthrough goes it should from what else I have read so far but that might just be theory and optimism.

 

Yea some systems are picky, but those should work, but id test it first.

 

5 hours ago, Marlberg said:

What are some of the issues you believe would be relevant?  Not calling you out. Asking sincerely because I don't know having never tried anything like this before.  All of my gpu passthrough and virtual machine experience is the standard virtualization kind of thing.  Web servers database servers Domain Controllers application and file servers virtualized etc.

Thinks like network latency, less image quality, more points of failure. Just doesn't really make sense here.

 

5 hours ago, Marlberg said:

Parsec hmmm?  Looks similar to MS Teams but without all of the business side bloat.  Nice!  I can still run that on a windows 10 Pro vm running on Proxmox. 

Not really the same as teams at all, made for streaming a display, not meetings.

 

5 hours ago, Marlberg said:

as far as my thin clients I was looking at something like this:

https://www.newegg.com/hp-2dh78at-aba/p/0A5-0074-000J8

 

 

What os would you run on those? Proxmox isn't really made for vid, so you have to diy the thin clients your self, so thats kinda a pain.