For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:
- a few gaming VMs
- a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
- an LLM server
- a Stable Diffusion server
- media server
Just to name a few possibilities…
Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.
So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?
How does the vGPU compare to running it on the bare metal? Last I tried things were painful but technically usable.
I don’t see any performance differences with the vgpu actually. I have more performance bottlenecks with the CPU, and my RAM isn’t the fastest, so I think I’m more CPU limited. Benchmarks I have run that are GPU focused seem to show little to no difference from what the physical card would do.