VM for Gaming

[EmualDave2k12]

I am trying to build a pc to be used by my both kids and they should be able to play both at the same time.

Here are the available hardware:
Ryzen R7 3800x
Asrock X570m
DDR4 32GB 3600Hz (2*16GB)
GTX 1070
GTX 780
2 x 500GB SSD
2 x 4TB HDD
2 x LCD Screens
2 x Keyboard
2 x Mouse
1 x USB Sound adapter
1 x USB to Ethernet adapter

So which VM software (preferable free) can do it for me?
I need something similar to UnRaid, but I don't need a storage server for now.


Thanks in advance

 

[kdh]

Unpopular opinion here.. Don't do it. Not worth it today. In theory, and on paper, sounds amazing and doable. While it is, its a headache. You will spend more time tinkering, tuning and tweaking it. I mean, if that is something you like doing, then totally go for it. But you are better off dual booting between gaming mode or vm mode. Better yet.. Boot into Windows and run Vmplayer for your vm work loads. Shut them down when you want to game. That's what I do. I literately spend 55 hours a week doing enterprise storage and all sorts of enterprise virtualization. After reading enough threads here, and what I do during the day? No way would I VM my gaming machine.

 

[rhansen5_99]

I would agree getting the gpu to pass through correctly to 2 guests will be a challenge not to mention what are you planning them to play on? You could grab a cheap i7 dell off ebay and throw the 2nd gpu in there really low budget.

 

[cyklondx]

Not great cards for passthrough as nv drivers are nasty. (or system in general, as its too new.)

You could try to use proxmox. Great part about it, you won't have to play around with unassigning a gpu for X as many people get stuck with that... and its quite prof. and visually easy.
In terms of your storage, just do ZFS partition (which you can use anyway with your VM's)

I personally use it, and its been great for me.

 

[Smoblikat]

I second proxmox, I use it for a single GPU passthrough VM running windows 7 or 10 (I test with both) and even with four old X5670 cores and a 1050Ti, I can play most lower end games (borderlands 2, CoD WaW etc..) really well. Youre going to run into issues with NV cards being passed through though, there are tools that help with the GTX 1XXX series, but for your 780, you would need to use a hex editor to manually strip some parts out of the header/footer of the rom.

I havent tested with more than 1 GPU in a system yet, but I would like to. Ive heard things like IOMMU groupings can be an issue if passing multiple devices to seperate VM's, so I guess motherboard choice is somewhat important.

 

[x3sphere]

Unpopular opinion here.. Don't do it. Not worth it today. In theory, and on paper, sounds amazing and doable. While it is, its a headache. You will spend more time tinkering, tuning and tweaking it. I mean, if that is something you like doing, then totally go for it. But you are better off dual booting between gaming mode or vm mode. Better yet.. Boot into Windows and run Vmplayer for your vm work loads. Shut them down when you want to game. That's what I do. I literately spend 55 hours a week doing enterprise storage and all sorts of enterprise virtualization. After reading enough threads here, and what I do during the day? No way would I VM my gaming machine.

Can't say this is true for me. I setup PCI-e passthrough on my rig more than a year ago and its been mostly set it and forget it. I have a macOS VM in addition to the Windows running too. At first, yes, it required quite a bit of tinkering, I spent like an entire weekend getting everything right. But I haven't had to touch the config since.

YMMV with the hardware you choose though. I, personally, have found Intel setups to be better suited for passthrough. AMD has broken things a few times with their BIOS updates before (I believe there are no current issues though). The IOMMU separation on the X299 boards is excellent.

NV cards are better in my experience for passthrough as well. A lot of the AMD cards have the reset issue which is extremely annoying, though it can be worked around with a kernel patch for some of them. The NV cards I've used (currently an RTX 2080 Ti) have no issue with resetting. The only issue with NV is that it throws an error while installing drivers if you don't spoof the vendor ID - this is a simple one line config edit. I would use NV for Windows and an AMD GPU for the host (AMD cards run great in Linux).

 

[Hakaba]

If I read that right you are missing a gpu for the host, however, you can possibly run the system headless but good luck figuring that out. It is possible to do with...

- popos
- Installing QEMU/KVM
- Enabling IMMOU passthrough on the OS
- Checking IMMOU grouping on devices, generally you want to see something like
20:00.00 Nvidia 6x
20:00.01 Nvidia 6x
- If you see objects mixed in with groups it is harder to perform since you generally need to pass through full groups
- Stubbing’int the id.s for gpu devices (need to block the host from using them)
- Building VM’s, assigning GPUs to them, and editing the XML to trick Nvidia cars into thinking they are not in a virtualized environment
etc....
It might be possible but will take more than a weekend worth of time playing around. Also, the older hardware might need additional work to get proper passthrough.

Then comes the CPU pinning tuning if you want to extract the best possible performance. Along with a lot of playing, testing, reading, with trial and error.