Which VM Product is right for me? (GPU Virtualization?)
I'm looking for a VM Product that has the following features:
- Being able to access the underlying hardware (GPU especially?)
- I have Virtualization Support on my CPU, so that's not a problem.
- Easily start up and manage my VMs either through a web or program interface.
- Free?
- Be able to remotely connect to my VMs (I could always use RDP, but I hear Citrix XenDesktop has the ability to do video playback?)
If Requirement #1 can't be met by any of them, what do you suggest for all of the other requirements? I was leaning towards XenDesktop until they told me the GPU can't be virtualized due to many virtualization products dealing only with server hardware...
Hardware Specs:
- AMD CPU (2.5 Ghz) with AMD-VT support.
- 4 GB of DDR2 RAM
- NVIDIA 9600 GT
- 400 GB OS HDD (WD)
- 1TB Storage HDD (WD)
GPU Virtualization isn't here yet. At least not properly. VMWare Workstation has it as an experimental feature.
As for the rest of it - Are you able to dedicate a piece of hardware to be a VM host, or does this need to run on top of your existing operating system?
If you're dedicating some hardware, then Citrix XenServer or VMWare ESXi are excellent, comparable choices, and both are free. ESXi has a web interface which can be used for console access to VMs, and will work fine over the 'net.
If you can only run VMs on top of an existing Windows/Linux installation as you'll be using it for other tasks, then it depends on your choice of OS. VMWare Workstation is a good choice, but not free.
Xen over Ubuntu can do that.
We were successful in our lab ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtmwnx-k2qg
I think latest Xen Server is your solution. I've tested GPU virtualization under Supermicro compute node with 2 NVIDIA Tesla C2050. Under the hood of Xen Server, you can create new virtual machines and forward host's PCI slot to any vm. I could connect two GPUs to two different CentOS virtual machines. But I failed to connect any GPU to Windows 7 vm.
I should notice that GPU virtualization feature in GUI is not free under the free version of Xen Server. But you can always use command line to forward PCI slot.