VM lab buildout help

[dbd_rage]

Looking for some input on ideas on a system to have multiple Virtual machines running at once. Each VM takes about 10 gigs of RAM to run and need about 190-200 gigs of HDD (Needs to be SSD). I want to be able to run maybe 3-5 at once with little to no performance hit. This would be a machine that I would game on as well, watch movies as well as use the VMs for work. I am also wanting a decent backup solution for it all. I want to keep my price as low as possible, but I know I am going to pay for this... Its pretty broad I know, but figured we have a lot of tech heads out here that know more on hardware\VMs than I do

Thanks

[Vash The Stampede]

First what's your base OS? Linux works great for this since I think Kernel 4.1 and up comes with a lot of VM stuff. With CPUs you're either looking at AMD 8 core cheap CPUs or Haswell-E. I know little about Opterons or Xeons but I do know that sometimes they can be a good alternative in terms of cost. And finally there's PCEe Passthrough which you can use to get max gaming performance on other machines but you need a dedicated GPU for it. So for example you could use a Radeon R9 390 for Windows and another Radeon R9 370 for Linux. keep in mind though that Nvidia graphic cards shut down when you try this, and they do this on purpose. The downside is that you'd need more graphic cards to be able to run multiple OS's and probably multiple monitors or a good way to switch between two display outputs. For example you could run Windows on Skylake graphics, Linux on a R9 390, and OS X on a R9 370.

[dbd_rage]

First what's your base OS? Linux works great for this since I think Kernel 4.1 and up comes with a lot of VM stuff. With CPUs you're either looking at AMD 8 core cheap CPUs or Haswell-E. I know little about Opterons or Xeons but I do know that sometimes they can be a good alternative in terms of cost. And finally there's PCEe Passthrough which you can use to get max gaming performance on other machines but you need a dedicated GPU for it. So for example you could use a Radeon R9 390 for Windows and another Radeon R9 370 for Linux. keep in mind though that Nvidia graphic cards shut down when you try this, and they do this on purpose. The downside is that you'd need more graphic cards to be able to run multiple OS's and probably multiple monitors or a good way to switch between two display outputs. For example you could run Windows on Skylake graphics, Linux on a R9 390, and OS X on a R9 370.

This is my gaming machine as well so I would stick with windows. (Since I am more comfortable with windows in general)

[Vash The Stampede]

This is my gaming machine as well so I would stick with windows. (Since I am more comfortable with windows in general)

As far as I'm aware of neither VMWare or VirtualBox can do the PCI Passthrough thing, but don't quote me on that. I believe only Linux can do this and only the latest kernels like 4.1 or 4.2. You need to use Linux KVM for this to work, but again I don't absolutely know for sure. Not sure the reason you're going to run so many different OS's on one machine but when it comes to VM's, linux is ahead of Windows on this. Also since you'll be doing PCE Passthrough the performance with Windows on a VM will be the same as if you were running it as the host.

My suggestion is visit the Tek Syndicate forums and ask them about it cause they did get GTAV running at full speed through KVM on Linux. Here's the link. But I do know for sure that Nvidia drivers check for virtualization flags and will throw error 43 if it detects being passed through into a virtual machine.

https://teksyndicate.com/videos/gta-...vm-passthrough