Crazy idea for a VM work station,help and advice would be appreciated

[Lenovus_]

I go to school for Interactive Media (3D/2D animation,graphic design, and video editing), and my class uses extremely under-powered and outdated computers that can barely run the programs we use. Recently my Prof. bought 2 
HP workstations for around 1900 a pop and he does not have the money to replace all the work stations... so my idea was to build a custom server for running about 25 VM's at once, each VM Connecting through a Thunder bolt 2 or 3 pass through and a Elgato Dock or something similar(like linus does in his house). Each server so far in theory (im willing to change the specs), would be 2- AMD Epyc 760, Western Digital Black 4tb hdd, 4- Nividia Quadro P6000, and 1tb wd Blue ssd (for boot drive), and im still undecided for the mobo and ram;and some risers and thunderbolt 2 or 3 expansion cards. Im trying to make it cheaper than just buying 25 new workstations, so do you guys think this setup will work?

[Acrain7]

I personally would not build 1 machine with more than 15 vms. You might be better off going with a few (about 3) lower core count machines. I haven't priced this out yet but I would recommend perusing this idea because fewer vms is usually more stable. For mobo, case and psu try looking into some bare bones systems from someone like Supermicro.  Please let me know if this helps.

[GDRRiley]

no. don't 

you would need a system like LTT used that fits 12 gpus then you could use 2 boxes (I don't believe suppermicro has updated it to epic yet). everyone could get 5 cores 10 thread if you went with 32 core cpus. 

[dalekphalm]

18 hours ago, Lenovus_ said:

I go to school for Interactive Media (3D/2D animation,graphic design, and video editing), and my class uses extremely under-powered and outdated computers that can barely run the programs we use. Recently my Prof. bought 2 
HP workstations for around 1900 a pop and he does not have the money to replace all the work stations... so my idea was to build a custom server for running about 25 VM's at once, each VM Connecting through a Thunder bolt 2 or 3 pass through and a Elgato Dock or something similar(like linus does in his house). Each server so far in theory (im willing to change the specs), would be 2- AMD Epyc 760, Western Digital Black 4tb hdd, 4- Nividia Quadro P6000, and 1tb wd Blue ssd (for boot drive), and im still undecided for the mobo and ram;and some risers and thunderbolt 2 or 3 expansion cards. Im trying to make it cheaper than just buying 25 new workstations, so do you guys think this setup will work?

Okay you need to think this through, and find out if what you want to do is even possible.

 

1st, You spec the server with 4x Quadro P6000's. Does that mean you're intending on each server hosting 4 VM's, with each VM dedicated to a user, with PCIe Passthrough to give them direct access to the P6000?

 

Or, are you intending on distributing the power of the P6000 over a number of users (Eg: All 25 users connect to one server, and each of the P6000's are shared between either 6 or 7 VM's)?

 

If the former (P6000 per user), that's goddamn stupid (no offense), because a P6000 costs like $5000, and is way more expensive by itself compared to the $1900 HP workstation.

 

If the latter, can your Media software even work in such a scenario where GPU power is shared among multiple VM's?

 

Personally, I think these types of systems are "neat", but ultimately not good for "production use". It's one thing to host servers on a VM, especially since any business who can afford to do so, is using clusters with failover protection anyway.

 

But in a classroom, if all 25 students are relying on one "Server" to act as the host for their "VM" workstation, that's one giant point of failure.

 

Right now, if a single workstation goes down, one student loses a bit of work (perhaps two have to share one station). But if the VM server goes down, well you might as well cancel class, because no one is getting any work done.