@gduperrey Update some Dell R720s with GPUs and a Dell R730. Update worked without any problem and VMs operate as expected. Will update this post if that changes during day-to-day operation. Great work!

@CodeMercenary I got my hands on a Nvidia RTX A2000 12GB (around 310€ used on Ebay) which might be an option, depending on what you want to do. It is a dual slot low profile GPU with 12GB VRAM, a max power consumption of 70W and active cooling. With a compute capability of 8.3 (P40: 6.1, M40: 5.2) it is fully supported by ollama. While 12GB is only 50% of one P40 with 24GB VRAM, it runs small LLMs nicely and with a high token per second rate. It can almost run the Llama3.2 11b vision model (11b-instruct-q4_K_M) using the GPU with only 3% offloaded to CPU. I will start testing this card during the weekend and can share some results if that would help.

@CodeMercenary I didn't know there was a midboard hard drive option for the R730xd - cool. You could always install a couple Nvidia T4s, but they only come with 16GB of VRAM and are much more expensive compared to the P40s. For reference, I've added a top view of the R720 with two P40s installed.

@manilx Maybe this post on Intel iGPU passthough gives some ideas? You probably loose the video output on the Protectli when you assign the iGPU to a VM.

@CodeMercenary The M40 is a server card and (physically) compatible with the R730, so no extra cooling is required (and possible). The downside is that the R730 most likely will still go full blast on all fans regardless of the actual power consumption since the server can not read the GPUs temperature. But there are scripts to manage the fan speeds based on server or GPU temperature. And once you have ollama installed, you can ask it how to write that code

@CodeMercenary Probably not insane if you want to learn using ollama or other LLM frameworks for inference. But the M40 is an ageing GPU with a low compute capability (v5.2), so with time, it might not be supported any more by platforms like ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp or aprhodite (did not check if they actually support that GPU, but Ollama has support for the M40). I doubt that you get an acceptable performance for stable diffusion (image generation) or training/fine-tuning. But what could you expect for $90?

The card has a power consumption (TDP) of 250W which is compatible with the 16x PCIe slot of riser #2. You have to be extra careful with the cable as it is not a standard cable. While most would suggest power supplies of 1100W for the Dell R730 to be on the save side, I run two P40s with 750W power supplies in a Dell R720. But I also power limit the card to 140W with little effect on the performance and have light workloads and no batch processing.

@olivierlambert People might be a little crazy, but they also have trust in the test and RC lifecycle of XCP-ng, which has proven to be very reliable thanks to the dedication of the Vates team and also the community. But I agree, for production use it's better to wait for a GA announcement. Anyway, congratulation to this important milestone in the development of XCP-ng .

@bleader There is a xcp-ng-8.3.0.iso on the ISO repository. Is that the release of XCP-ng 8.3 ? Looking forward to an official announcement .

@McHenry Maybe this old post helps Error importing large vhd file. It also links to the documentation on how to Migrate to XCP-ng from Hyper-V, but I guess you already read that.

@bleader Update worked well on my two node homelab and everything looks and works normal after reboot. I did some basic stuff like VM and Storage migration, but nothing in depth. Let's see how things work out.

@marvine I am using two Nvidia P40 with passthrough to Debian VMs with XCP-ng 8.3 RC1. I had no issues with passthrough, installing and runing the P40. For Windows VMs, this older post might give some more information.

Mh, that sounds interesting, but I never done this. Can you suggest a starting point, example or documentation to get started?

Yes, that is my challenge.

In the Debian VM, I can use nvidia-smi to get GPU info from the GPUs that are passed through by XCP-ng to the VM. I can not use ipmitool localy in the Debian VM to get host/server info and control the fan speed (most likely because /dev/ipmi0 is visible in DOM0 on my Dell R720 but not visible in the VM). One option would be to use IPMI Over LAN to give the VM access to the iDRAC interface, but that is in the management VLAN.

My thought is to dynamically control the fan speeds from within the VM that creates the thermal load, or even turn the VM off when the load exceeds a certain critical threshold.

I am using a Dell Poweredge R720 with two Nvidia P40 to learn about Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning in general. XCP-ng is installed and both P40s are pass-throughed (if that word exists) to a Debian 12 VM that runs Ollama in Docker. I do powerlimit both GPUs, but during inference the passively cooled GPUs sometimes still get hot anyway.

On a bare metal Debain 12 install, I can use nvdia-smi to read the max. GPU temperatur and ipmitool to read the max. inlet/outlet/CPU temperatur and set the fan speed dynamicly, again with ipmitool. That works reliably.

I don't want to use ipmitool -H {ip_address} -U {username} -P {password} {command} (which seems to be the #1 recommendation) because I don't want to punch a hole in the firewall to give this VM access to the management network. Another control VM that queries both temperature sources (iDRAC via ipmitool, Ollama Debian VM with P40 Paththrough via SSH and nvidia-smi) would also work, but feels to complicated.

Any idea if something like running ipmitool locally in a Debain 12 VM can be achieved with XCP-ng?

@bleader Installed on my playlab. Everything looks normal, let's see how it goes.

@Seneken Have you considered using Xen Orchestra (XO) instead of XCP-ng Center? XO is the recommended solution to manage Xenserver or XCP-ng hosts and pools. The Xen Orchestra from Source comes with all the bells and whistles for a homelab, while the Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA) is intended for enterprise scenarios with support. But you most likely already know that and are just interested in a windows client

Having XO from source or XOA act as a certification authority for the XCP-ng hosts is for sure a good approach. Would be great if that could include the VMs running on the XCP-ng hosts, which is my main goal (apart from being able to HTTPS into XO from source of course).

@kevdog Internal server can not be reached from the internet (no port forwarding so no HTTP challenge) and my hosting provider does not have an API for DNS challenges. Thats why I use pfSense "on the edge" at the moment. I admit that a cheap VPS runing acme.sh could do the trick, but my automation works and I am lazy .

@bleader Updated my two node homelab and everything seems to work as expected. Let's see how things go over the next days.

@stormi Update of my XCP-ng 8.3 test server through CLI (yum update) and rebooted. All VMs work as expected.