Multiple clients gaming on one System

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Zurec

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Sep 5, 2014
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Hey people,

i was just wondering if there is any way of running multiple instances of Windows on one physical system, like a server. I mean, i that even possible? in windows server you can have multiple clients, and multiple desktops, but from my understanding they're all virtual. Would it be possible to have a dual-cpu system with two gpu's in there, and dedicate one piece of hardware to one OS?

That way, i could have multiple users gaming on one rig at the same time...

If that is not an option, how much of a hit would modern games take if they were to be run on a virtualized client via windows server?
 
Technically nVidia GRID servers can do this, but you're looking at a $30k piece of hardware.
Regular virtual machines aren't going to have any gaming viable 3D acceleration.
 
Ummm, well you can do it, but it isn't useful really. You can virtualize multiple windows desktops on one system using VMWare vSphere/ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V no problem, we do it at work. You can also virtualize the 3D accelerator and share it among VMs. Hyper-V is particularly adept at doing that. However there is plenty of overhead for doing this. You virtualize systems when you have a bunch of low impact systems that you want to concentrate on hardware, or for getting the reliability benefits of being able to migrate VMs around different hardware. For performance, you still run on dedicated hardware.

Also it ends up being expensive compared to just getting multiple systems. Rather then dumping a bunch of high end hardware in to one server, you are generally better getting a bunch of lower end hardware spread among multiple computers for a use case like gaming. Costs don't scale linearly with hardware. For example a 4 core 3GHz Xeon will cost you around $400, a 2.6GHz 8 core Xeon will cost you about $1000. A 2.3GHz 16 core Xeon Intel won't say what it costs, they don't sell it retail, but it is usually around $4000 from OEMs in a system.

Also hardware costs aside, the software is a lot. A 2012R2 license is not cheap and you have to buy OS licenses for the VMs as well (for desktop OSes at least). VMWare is even more expensive, in my experience, and you often have to pay for features.

But you can do it. I have set up a 2012R2 server with an accelerator and had a VM run 3DMark, and one it over Remote Desktop (accelerating graphics over RDP is one of Hyper-V's things). You just need to have a reason other than saving money. There are reasons to want to run high impact stuff on a VM, but trying to save money really isn't one.
 
hm, ok. Thats basically what i expected from the virtualization side. But wouldn't it be possible to run multiple instances of windows on a machine with more than one physical processor? Basically two independent OS on one system, since the critical components are available 2 times? (cpu, gpu)
 
The company I used to work for done this (just for science) and your going to need all the high end stuff. Also your wiring has to be decent (not the crappy lan cables) to send data.
 
Zurec said:
hm, ok. Thats basically what i expected from the virtualization side. But wouldn't it be possible to run multiple instances of windows on a machine with more than one physical processor? Basically two independent OS on one system, since the critical components are available 2 times? (cpu, gpu)
Click to expand...

No, because they all work together. When you put 2 CPUs in a system, they talk to each other and work together. They aren't separate. You in fact pay more for CPUs and chipsets that can make that happen.

If you want two completely separate units, then you buy separate units. You can install them both in one box, if you like. There are things like that (blade servers in particular) out there. However if all your stuff is on one motherboard the whole point is that it works together. That necessitates that there is one kernel in charge of everything.

I'm really not sure what you are after here.
 
Sycraft said:
No, because they all work together. When you put 2 CPUs in a system, they talk to each other and work together. They aren't separate. You in fact pay more for CPUs and chipsets that can make that happen.

If you want two completely separate units, then you buy separate units. You can install them both in one box, if you like. There are things like that (blade servers in particular) out there. However if all your stuff is on one motherboard the whole point is that it works together. That necessitates that there is one kernel in charge of everything.

I'm really not sure what you are after here.
Click to expand...

Well, thanks anyway. All that was just really a thought experiment.
 
And the CPU by itself may not be enough for high end gaming either, that CPU is only doing 2.4GHz on 3 cores per each of the 4 clients, and quite a few games out there definitely wants higher clockspeed, and some even core count for that.

As Dangman said, probably better to build several computers (one for each player), plus another cheapish one for running dedicated servers would be better option, you can also fine tune each computer to specific player's needs.
 
You're not going to be running multiple operating systems like that, not how all this works.

You'll need one core OS and then you can spin VMs off it. We play UT at work off Hyper-V VMs with one VM hosting the server as well. Works like a charm.

What you want is not possible physically, but it is possible on the logical level.

But, and here is the huge but, it will run like dog shit. Xeons lack the clock speed of desktop CPUs. A quad 16core server will run games worse than a single quadcore desktop. To make matters worse, crap like quad channel memory is actually slower than dual channel (there is a latency hit) for stuff like gaming... and then there's the performance hit for ECC RAM. This stuff costs more for a reason, but it's worse for gaming.

Stay away from Xeon and multi socket for gaming, you're paying more money for things to be slower. But if you have enough cores and ram floating around on a workstation and are aware of the draw backs it will run.
 
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