I currently have a workstation I use for productivity and gaming, as well as a ‘server’ running on an old Athlon CPU primarily functioning as a file server running Unraid, with several Docker containers.

For much beyond NAS functionality, this server is very underpowered, it’s running an array of old HDDs, and where I’m messing around more with different environments, I could really use the ability to quickly spin up and switch between OS’s.

Upgrading the server seems kinda silly when my workstation already has enough power and is always up. I’m thinking about running the workstation as the server using Unraid, setting it up with a HBA and some SAS drives I already have, then running several VMs.

I’d be daily driving these VMs, planning on Windows still for now, with things like CAD and gaming remaining the primary functions. I’d like to experiment with Linux more for regular use, and will likely be running additional VMs for development and experiments.

This sounds like a logical idea, but I’m concerned about some of the potential technicalities that could cause me problems. I know anticheat can be a concern, but I don’t think that will effect any games I play.

Are there any additional things I should consider here? Am I best interfacing via thin client, or can I connect directly?

  • @[email protected]English
    7•1 year ago

    Usually for Windows VM gaming you want to pass through a GPU and a USB controller and plug in directly. You might be able to use something like Steam streaming but I wouldn’t recommend a normal desktop-app-oriented thin client setup, not having tried it.

    You may run into weird problems with latency spikes: mostly it will work great and everything runs at 90 FPS or whatever, but then inexplicably 1 frame every few minutes takes 100ms and nobody can tell you why.

    There can also be problems with storage access speed. What ought to be very fast storage on the host is substantially slower storage once the image file and host FS overhead, or the block device pass through overhead, come into play. Or maybe you just need an NVMe device to pass straight through.