Any hardware recommendations? - consolidating desktop on server
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The pass-through worked well in my case, attached to a Ubuntu 22.04 VM and the driver loaded ( had to blacklist it because I wanted to use the CUDA toolkit ) fine. The toolkit also installed fine, I kept the OpenGL libs so the GUI still works in XCP. I'd suppose this would also work just fine with Windows. I'll have to test that with a eval ISO.
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Just a little update on some of the purchases for folks shopping for compatible hardware. The Supermicro motherboard was a bust. Supermicro H13SAE-MF wouldn’t boot XCP-NG. It initially would boot, but after applying a BIOS update, it wouldn’t boot it at all. A couple of other Linux CDs wouldn’t work either, but I did get Ubuntu to boot. And I had other weird issues where the BIOS would hang at POST if I had my USB DVD drive plugged into certain USB ports instead of others.
The BMC worked ok overall. Interestingly, mounting an ISO image via IPMI requires an additional license, so I used physical CDs or my piKVM. Overall the whole experience felt like I was working with a preproduction board and not a finished product. I emailed Supermicro and they told me only UEFI OSes are supported, and I was using UEFI OSes. They also sent me the OS compatibility chart, which you can find here: https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/support/resources/OS/OS_Comp_H13_B650_AM5-UP.cfm
So the OS list seemed very limited to me, and it doesn’t seem this motherboard is intended for general purpose use. Maybe after a few BIOS updates it will have broader UEFI OS support.
I’m returning the Supermicro board and just ordered the Asrock Rack B650D4U. Seems like a lot of folks have success with AsRock, and I’ll try to report back if this specific mobo works.
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@Niko1 Some motherboards updated their BIOS for Windows 11 compatibility which may have automatically turned on secure boot, etc, etc.
I can't see any other reason Linux ISO's would all of a sudden fail to boot.
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@Pyroteq said in Any hardware recommendations? - consolidating desktop on server:
@Niko1 Some motherboards updated their BIOS for Windows 11 compatibility which may have automatically turned on secure boot, etc, etc.
I can't see any other reason Linux ISO's would all of a sudden fail to boot.
I’m not really sure. I assumed there must have been some way to get it to work, but given the other issues and Supermicro highlighting the very limited OS support, returning the motherboard seemed like the most prudent action. I got the AsRock board, and it’s working great so far. I’ll post my build and my AsRock experience once I have a chance to test more
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Just to close this out, here is my build so far. Everything works great. I’ve tried both moonlight and Steam remote play. Steam works much better with my upgraded setup than it did before, so for ease of use, I’ve been using that. I’ve been streaming in 4k without any issues so far
- AsRock Rack B650D4U
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X - 16-Core
- 64GB ECC RAM Supermicro (Hynix) 32GB 288-Pin DDR5 4800 (PC5-38400) Server Memory (MEM-DR532MD-EU48)
- ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge DLSS 3 12GB
So far, everything works as well as I could expect for game streaming. The performance hit seems minimal. Now I can get rid of my old windows Hades Canyon NUC.
I have an annoying issue when booting. Everything goes through IPMI until grub boots xcp-ng. I suspect it then redirects video to the physical vga port. I’ll post a separate thread for that since it’s not really related to VM gaming.
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N Niko1 has marked this topic as solved on
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@Niko1 Glad you're having a good experience with it!
I have more recently done GPU passthrough and it's been fantastic actually so I take back a bit of what I had said before. For some reason in the past I was having major issues with it and I think I may have had defective hardware (very hard to rule out in this situation though).
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I’ve been using XCP-NG 8.2 for a little while , and I’ve decided it may be time to upgrade my aging server hardware ASUS RS500A-E11-WOCPU006Z 1U Rackmount Server Barebone Socket SP3. One goal is to host about 20 windows pro 11 VM's, any suggestion for my project.?
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@Dosittec2020 Out of curiosity, why not checking the refurb market?
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@olivierlambert kindly this project will be a cpa office, i dont think refurb is good idea,?
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Depends. Dell refurb is pretty stable and well supported, with recent firmware updates and great track record of rock solid. Eg the 640 generation, even if pretty old is a true workhorse.
However, I can understand your hesitation, brand new hardware seems more appropriate at first glance, but decent refurb companies provide guarantee and even replacing part rather fast.
