For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:
- a few gaming VMs
- a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
- an LLM server
- a Stable Diffusion server
- media server
Just to name a few possibilities…
Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.
So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?
I have upgraded my GPU on my desktop without upgrading anything else. Leaving me with a spare GPU and no other hardware.
Self hosting, I have also pulled GPUs out of systems to keep the power requirements down. As most of the time onboard GPUs are just fine for Self hosting applications. Also leaving me with a spare GPU.
However over the years GPUs have because more popular for processing there are more arguments to keep the GPU in a home server. So I can see how this is going away.