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Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

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11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#11
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.

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#13
post #12

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.

Read the answers to the identical question I posted on this thread a couple of hours ago.

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)?

> 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..

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

> 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..

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.

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#16

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?

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.

nice words, thanks!

I have a lot of difficult to explain this. I will improve the docs... maybe record a video.

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#17
post #12

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.

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.

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

> 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..

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 ", copy the dumpfile, "qmrestore ", voila

Re: Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nice words, thanks! I have a lot of difficult to explain this. I will improve the docs... maybe record a video.

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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