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?
This is really amazing! In theory, can you can use 2gb with 4 different VMs?
Sure, but you’ll get diminishing returns most likely as consumer hardware doesn’t really have the resources to scale that way very well if all the VMs are running demanding apps simultaneously.
Even for something like 4 VMs that just do NVenc, there are limits for how many streams the GPU can do. I think there’s another patch that lets you raise that, but at some point you’ll run out of resources quick. Even powerful consumer gear isn’t really designed to be used by more than one user/app and it starts to show the more you virtualize and split those resources.