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ATI ESXi or Nvidia qemu?

F

FlangeMonkey

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 11, 2010
Messages
161
Hi,

I'm building a new workstation and my plan is to virtualise it.

My original though was to go ATI R9 290x with ESXi, because of the flexibility of using vt-d/vdga however I cannot ignore the performance, heat and power consumption of Nvidia's GTX 970. The cost is also about the same!

I cannot use the Nvidia in an ESXi solution with VGA Passthough, so I'd be looking at Qemu and a completely different direction than an ESXi deployment.

So the question stands ATI with ESXi or Nvidia with Qemu?

I'm interested in your guys input as well as performance comparisons between the two, because I cannot find any reference material on Qemu's performance.

Thanks,
 
1. Why do you want to virtualize?
2. Have you looked at VirtualBox? It has a 2d and 3d acceleration option. I would think it would work with both AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Using VirtualBox will give you the bare metal speed for your main machine while at the same time being able to run VMs.
 
I'm not sure Vbox would be faster than ESXi or Qemu, I was thinking the opposite.
 
How deep does the rabbit hole go... I can go into why, but at this point it's about concept. Its not a question of a concept change to Type 2, but bare metal with VGA Paththough.

I've seen a very nice setup on Qemu using Nvidia, but I'm concerned about performance over VMDirectPath.

My original plan has always to go ESXi using vdga, but its these dam Nvidia GTX 970's that has got my pants in a twist...
 
You'll get basically bare metal performance in either situation with passthrough, from my understanding. I've done the whole passthrough thing with qemu, but back before the new VFIO framework was in place. I think I was at worst 10% off of expected futuremark scores for my hardware. I'm still not an esxi person, so I don't have any anecdotal comparison there.

My experience with VGA passthrough in general was that it was great when it worked, but sometimes locked up the host. Things have probably improved, but I eventually just yanked the gaming card out and built a mini-itx system around it.
 
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