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I may be being dense, but why would you want to do this? Are you saying you can get equivalent performance running games under a Windows VM as booting directly?

I may be being dense, but why would you want to do this? Are you saying you can get equivalent performance running games under a Windows VM as booting directly? What are the tradeoffs involved?

Scramblejams 11y ago
Right, that's the promise. The reason I want to do this is that it's great to throw your money into a single high-spec machine, with fast processors, lots of them, lots of RAM, quiet fans, SSDs, etc., and all your VMs are able to share in the benefits. Plus you have far less hardware to manage. Also, I find it vastly easier to work with Windows when the backing store is abstracted away into something like LVM where I can easily snapshot and rollback and change it out, store it on a RAID array maybe, and all Windows thinks is it's dealing with a bog standard C drive. Plus, there's a it's-just-cool factor. Cool to have one awesome machine and three monitors, three keyboards and three mice coming out of it, running different desktop operating systems simultaneously, etc. It's like the mainframe got reinterpreted for modern home use. The trade off is that often much fiddling is required to make it work. Lots of motherboards have hidden gotchas. Consumer Nvidia cards can be somewhere between a hassle to impossible to get working (with KVM currently an exception to this, though I'm guessing that will turn out to be short-lived). Going with AMD means using their drivers, and on Linux I've always had problems with them. (Though if you don't need high-end 3D on your Linux VM, you could grab a cheap Quadro off eBay and that'll work without difficulty.) And if you have a big hardware problem like a motherboard failure, all your systems are down, though that's true for any kind of VM setup.
slantyyz 11y ago
You can get surprisingly good performance, but sometimes it might be the only way to get a game working on a particular machine. My Lenovo Y50 has an nVidia GPU with Optimus switching. I have a few games that don't seem to run (Street Fighter X Tekken and Blazblue Continuum Shift), but I can get them to run at 60FPS@1080p on a VM.

I may be being dense, but why would you want to do this? Are you saying you can get equivalent performance running games under a Windows VM as booting directly? What are the tradeoffs involved?

Scramblejams 11y ago

Right, that's the promise. The reason I want to do this is that it's great to throw your money into a single high-spec machine, with fast processors, lots of them, lots of RAM, quiet fans, SSDs, etc., and all your VMs are able to share in the benefits. Plus you have far less hardware to manage. Also, I find it vastly easier to work with Windows when the backing store is abstracted away into something like LVM where I can easily snapshot and rollback and change it out, store it on a RAID array maybe, and all Windows thinks is it's dealing with a bog standard C drive. Plus, there's a it's-just-cool factor. Cool to have one awesome machine and three monitors, three keyboards and three mice coming out of it, running different desktop operating systems simultaneously, etc. It's like the mainframe got reinterpreted for modern home use. The trade off is that often much fiddling is required to make it work. Lots of motherboards have hidden gotchas. Consumer Nvidia cards can be somewhere between a hassle to impossible to get working (with KVM currently an exception to this, though I'm guessing that will turn out to be short-lived). Going with AMD means using their drivers, and on Linux I've always had problems with them. (Though if you don't need high-end 3D on your Linux VM, you could grab a cheap Quadro off eBay and that'll work without difficulty.) And if you have a big hardware problem like a motherboard failure, all your systems are down, though that's true for any kind of VM setup.

slantyyz 11y ago

You can get surprisingly good performance, but sometimes it might be the only way to get a game working on a particular machine. My Lenovo Y50 has an nVidia GPU with Optimus switching. I have a few games that don't seem to run (Street Fighter X Tekken and Blazblue Continuum Shift), but I can get them to run at 60FPS@1080p on a VM.