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

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

#4
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?

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

#5

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.

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

#6
post #3

Love Proxmox!

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.

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

#7

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.

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)?

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

#8

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)?

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.

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

#9
post #6
post #3

Love Proxmox!

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.

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...

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

#10

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)?

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.
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