[HN Gopher] Proxmox PCI Switcher - Switch among Guest VMs organi...
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Proxmox PCI Switcher - Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource
Pool
Author : rosineygp
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-04-10 15:25 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Ran proxmox from beta .9 to 1.8 ish at my previous job in
| production - maybe 20 VM's with uptimes in the 5 years range.
|
| Solid product, solid team. Really a nice polished product at this
| point.
|
| Edit: just for clarification this looks really neat for GPU pci
| switching? Back in 2012 ish we tried to build a 8 GPU bitcoin
| mining beast group thread over on bitcointalk on proxmox and we
| could never get more than 6 GPU's working IIRC. Things were
| different then.
| unixhero wrote:
| Love Proxmox!
| _joel wrote:
| Indeed, I've used it for years. Actually ran a production
| deployment for Sahana Foundation where it was used to
| coordinate disaster recovery efforts in the field, Haiti,
| Chengdu etc. It never missed a beat, even with KVM being
| (fairly) new at the time.
| unixhero wrote:
| Yes exactly. And now it has matured immensely, even expanded
| their offering into a Backup-node product and various ways to
| make use of zfs and ceph. Such a fun solution to solve
| problems with. I have used it in production for container
| workloads without any issues, for 4 years.
|
| I only wish they would build a way to also handle handle
| Docker containers[0]. It is no problem to run in a VM of
| course, but the footprint of a VM is completely different
| than from a container.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/g3wozs/best_way
| _to...
| rosineygp wrote:
| Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool
| Naac wrote:
| What does this actually do?
|
| I'm familiar with proxmox, and I think I'm a fairly technical
| person, but I can't decipher what this means:
|
| "Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool"
|
| This readme does not seem very well written.
| rosineygp wrote:
| When you have a PCI device assigned to two or more VMs you
| cannot up them at same time... the second will fail because the
| resource already in use.
|
| This tool handler this kind of "lock" like a switch button.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| Read the answers to the identical question I posted on this
| thread a couple of hours ago.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I use (and love!) Proxmox but as a way to virtualise dedicated
| servers (eg from OVH / Hetzner) and avoid having to pay hosts
| like DO everytime I need a new VPS for a project.
|
| I'm completely confused by what this ("Proxmox PCI Switcher") is
| - and the readme isn't helping very much. Can someone explain?
| simcop2387 wrote:
| It looks like it's a tool to help manage hardware passthrough,
| specifically to pass through a single resource (GPU most often)
| and have the UI know that all the guests sharing it are
| mutually exclusive and you can only have one running at a time.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| Thanks, I see (I think).
|
| So some use cases would be for gaming (where you really need
| dedicated graphics performance), and also for MacOS as a
| guest OS (as otherwise the user interface is really slow)?
| _joel wrote:
| Passing through for GPU releated ML tasks or perhaps HW
| accelerated encoding. I've also used PCI passthrough with
| Blackmagic SDI capture cards so that a given VM could
| access the device and the SDI input feed.
| djrogers wrote:
| > for MacOS as a guest OS (as otherwise the user interface
| is really slow)
|
| Is this something specific to proxmox or non-mac hosted
| virtualization? I ask because I regularly run MacOS without
| GPU passthrough without any UI slowdowns at all. In fact,
| at one point I ran macOS in a VM as the primary UI on my
| MacBook for several years..
| m463 wrote:
| I have a main mac desktop, and "uploaded" my macbook into
| proxmox near the start of the pandemic. I just use mac to
| mac screen sharing to get to it and it works wonderfully.
|
| If you don't know, screen sharing is done very well - it
| does very intelligent things, such as drag and drop files
| from desktop to desktop or rich-text copy/paste between
| systems. It will also pass keys correctly, so command-q
| will quit a remote app instead of quitting the screen
| sharing app itself. same with alt-tab.
|
| I used to use screen sharing with the macbook itself, but
| it kept going to sleep with the lid closed at inopportune
| times even with caffeinate, so I just cut to the chase.
|
| I also was able to migrate the macos vm when I upgraded
| my proxmox machine hardware. "vzdump <vmid>", copy the
| dumpfile, "qmrestore <dumpfile> <vmid>", voila
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I tried running MacOS as a guest OS using VMWare Fusion a
| while back (2 or 3 years), and my recollection is that
| all the UI stuff (drag/drop, transitions, etc) were super
| slow.
|
| This was on a late 2013 though, so the experience may be
| very different now, in fact now that I've replaced it
| with a 2020 iMac, I'll give it another go and see.
| zrail wrote:
| This is also useful if you want to pass dedicated network
| interfaces through to specific guests. For example, I am
| planning to run a router on top of proxmox and pass through
| several dedicated NICs specifically for routing purposes.
| rosineygp wrote:
| nice words, thanks!
|
| I have a lot of difficult to explain this. I will improve the
| docs... maybe record a video.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| That would be a great idea, especially for people (like me)
| who are struggling to understand what this is, and why it
| could be useful.
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(page generated 2021-04-12 23:02 UTC)