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

47 points by rosineygp 5y ago

rosineygp 5y ago
Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool
unixhero 5y ago
Love Proxmox!
- _joel 5y ago
  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.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    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_run_docker_in_proxmox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/g3wozs/best_way_to...
monkey_monkey 5y ago
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?
- simcop2387 5y ago
  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.
  - monkey_monkey 5y ago
    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)?
    - _joel 5y ago
      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.
    - zrail 5y ago
      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.
    - djrogers 5y ago
      > 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..
      - monkey_monkey 5y ago
        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.
jcpham2 5y ago
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.
Naac 5y ago
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.
- monkey_monkey 5y ago
  Read the answers to the identical question I posted on this thread a couple of hours ago.
- rosineygp 5y ago
  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.

47 points by rosineygp 5y ago

rosineygp 5y ago

Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

unixhero 5y ago

Love Proxmox!

_joel 5y ago
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.
- unixhero 5y ago
  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_run_docker_in_proxmox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/g3wozs/best_way_to...

monkey_monkey 5y ago

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?

simcop2387 5y ago
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.
- monkey_monkey 5y ago
  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)?
  - _joel 5y ago
    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.
  - zrail 5y ago
    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.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > 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..
    - monkey_monkey 5y ago
      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.

jcpham2 5y ago

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.

Naac 5y ago

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.

monkey_monkey 5y ago
Read the answers to the identical question I posted on this thread a couple of hours ago.
rosineygp 5y ago
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.