Ultimate flexible Hardware / VM Configuration ?

Hello,

I tried to run RC on a Windows virtual machine under Vmware’s ESXI 6.0
This works fine for alignment work, but…
unfortunately my motherboard (Intel S2600CW2R) does not seem to support PCIe / GPU passthrough, so I can’t use the GPU)
Why this config would be interesting ?
First of all, you could run more than 1 VM / RC installation simultaneously, and you could dynamically allocate to each VM the amount of RAM / CPU or other resources. Of course you need 1 RC license per VM, but that’s not the issue.
It would allow to process an urgent job quickly without interrupting a big job.
Second, you need less physical hardware and you could use it more efficiently I guess.

But I wonder if such a config would work ? Is it possible to share 1 GPU between multiple VM’s ?
or maybe you could dedicate 1 GPU card to a specific VM ?

If anybody has a PC/Motherboard/Bios that supports the GPU pass-thru, I’ll be very interested to know.
It’s in fact very easy to test: download/install VmWare’s free ESXI 6.0 on a USB stick, (with Rufus: writes the ISO file to the stick)
boot from the USB stick and you can choose to install ESXI on the same stick.
Then with the vSphere client (on a client pc), look under hardware / advanced settings (see screenshot)
and you’ll see if passthrough is possible.

Hi Wim Willems
at least take a look at this list first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I … g_hardware
For deeper understanding of the problem you need to dig a bit more into this, so it will take some time for a proper answer.

Thanks for the useful info.
Any idea why there are no server boards or Xeon CPUs in this list, or anything with DDR4 RAM ?

All Xeons will work and v4 use DDR4. For virtualization, only Tesla/Grid cards can be virtualized… however you should be able to pass through. I have it working on a similar board.

@Manav Agarwal
Thanks!
These grid & Tesla cards are really expensive, >8000 €. But I guess when you dedicate one or more regular GPU cards to a specific VM, that VM will use it just as if they were physically connected ?
So you could assign GPUs to VM’s as needed ?

Wim Willems wrote:

@Manav Agarwal
Thanks!
These grid & Tesla cards are really expensive, >8000 €. But I guess when you dedicate one or more regular GPU cards to a specific VM, that VM will use it just as if they were physically connected ?
So you could assign GPUs to VM’s as needed ?

Basically yes. You need to enable Intel-VT-d in your bios. You may run into issues though if you want to use Nvidia consumer cards when you try to load the driver though. There are some workarounds but it depends on what card you currently have.