Media NAS/VM's for old-school gaming

[Remamian]

So building a new PC from the Core P7 case. Nearly have my PC built but realized one of the 'wings' on the case is entirely not needed. Talking with my roomate we decided we wanted to have a media nas for inside the house to store our media library of movies/tv shows. I decided i'd mount it all on this extra wing and do my own custom either PLEX or KODI 4k media server and looking at 32+tb of nas storage. I was originally going to just get a cheap imbeded board from newegg for this but my friend would like to be able to run a 'lan party' off this server with 4 VM's that can run up to mid-2000's games (Thinking more dos-box or similar games that may not be easy to run off modern computers). Something where we can pre-setup parameters that can be loaded for a VM. Like "I want to run Diablo 1, let me load up a VM that can install that with little or no effort and be able to lan directly with others on the network with no delay"

 

So yea looking for some options, i've not done something like this in the past but more than comfortable learning. I'd like to keep as low TDP as possible. And looking at what really i'm needing to do what my roomate suggested. From what i saw online each VM would need its own independant GPU, however i'm not going for anything remotely modern as far as hardware requirements.

[Electronics Wizardy]

From the age of those games, you really won't need much cpu power for them.

 

Id probably get  a b360 board, a i5 8400(low power, has igpu built in keeping slot open, more than enough cpu power for this)

 

Then get what ever drives you want, Id probably get something like a few of those 8tb external drives taken from their cases.

 

Then Id run proxmox on it. That allows you to use ZFS for storage, and easily run vms with a web interface.

[Remamian]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

From the age of those games, you really won't need much cpu power for them.

 

Id probably get  a b360 board, a i5 8400(low power, has igpu built in keeping slot open, more than enough cpu power for this)

 

Then get what ever drives you want, Id probably get something like a few of those 8tb external drives taken from their cases.

 

Then Id run proxmox on it. That allows you to use ZFS for storage, and easily run vms with a web interface.

 

So then doing the above, i will not need seperate gpu's to run each VM. It can handle 4 simultaneous VM's each with their own vGPU to handle those older games?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Remamian said:

 

So then doing the above, i will not need seperate gpu's to run each VM. It can handle 4 simultaneous VM's each with their own vGPU to handle those older games?

With games that old a vgpu will easily let you play them.

 

What os are the vms running? Runing old oses will be missing features.

 

And its gonna be a pain to have a lot of monitors attached to this if you want that.

[Remamian]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

With games that old a vgpu will easily let you play them.

 

What os are the vms running? Runing old oses will be missing features.

 

And its gonna be a pain to have a lot of monitors attached to this if you want that.

 

More than likely dosBOX, 95, 98se. 

 

Titles he got back to me with would be like

Diablo

Diablo 2

SWAT 4

DOOM

 

Highest from what he gave me seems to be Unreal Engine 2, anything newer would be run off each persons gaming rig. 

Connecting to these VM's would equally be run off each persons gaming rig connected to the network. I just finished setting up 10gb through the house, so the slowest anything would run would be limited by the hardware card at 1gbps

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Remamian said:

 

More than likely dosBOX, 95, 98se. 

 

Titles he got back to me with would be like

Diablo

Diablo 2

SWAT 4

DOOM

 

Highest from what he gave me seems to be Unreal Engine 2, anything newer would be run off each persons gaming rig. 

Connecting to these VM's would equally be run off each persons gaming rig connected to the network. I just finished setting up 10gb through the house, so the slowest anything would run would be limited by the hardware card at 1gbps

It seems much easier to just have every one run a vm on their system with something like hyper-v. Much less latency, and doing it on the server won't make it any better.

[Remamian]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

It seems much easier to just have every one run a vm on their system with something like hyper-v. Much less latency, and doing it on the server won't make it any better.

I think the reason my roomate suggested was just because it would be a 'bragging' factor to have a server in the house for old games. I dont mind putting the hardware together for it since i'm already doing a 4k Media NAS

[Robertoal]

What could be interesting is to build a nvidia grid system like this. (to share GPU resources over different VM's, instead of pcie pass trough)

 

an nvidia grid k2 card only cost around 360 dollars and has 8g of ram, so for older games you could have some proper performance!