Proxmox PCI Switcher – Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool | Hacker News Reader

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

github.com

47 pointsrosineygp18 comments

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.

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.

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.

Read the answers to the identical question I posted on this thread a couple of hours 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?

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.

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)?

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.

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.

> 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..

I have a main mac desktop, and "uploaded" my macbook into proxmox near the start of the pandemic. I just use mac to mac screen sharing to get to it and it works wonderfully.

If you don't know, screen sharing is done very well - it does very intelligent things, such as drag and drop files from desktop to desktop or rich-text copy/paste between systems. It will also pass keys correctly, so command-q will quit a remote app instead of quitting the screen sharing app itself. same with alt-tab.

I used to use screen sharing with the macbook itself, but it kept going to sleep with the lid closed at inopportune times even with caffeinate, so I just cut to the chase.

I also was able to migrate the macos vm when I upgraded my proxmox machine hardware. "vzdump <vmid>", copy the dumpfile, "qmrestore <dumpfile> <vmid>", voila

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.

nice words, thanks!

I have a lot of difficult to explain this. I will improve the docs... maybe record a video.

That would be a great idea, especially for people (like me) who are struggling to understand what this is, and why it could be useful.

Love Proxmox!

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.

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...

Switch among Guest VMs organized by Resource Pool

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