ESX/XEN/KVM with Video card passthrough as Steam Streaming server.

[Construct]

I currently plan on setting up a virtual server XEN/KVM/ESX with 3-4x video cards installed and passed through to individual VM's (Most likely windows as thats where the bulk of my steam games are) then use these backend nodes to stream to several thin client steamOS installs. Has anyone else considered a setup like this? I figure a setup like this would allow me to consolidate my hardware as well as allowing a great deal of flexability. Additionally i hope a setup like this would allow some of my friends who bring crappy laptops to lan parties to stream from a more powerful bak end steam node.

[Roach]

Yes, I have but it will only work if steam will let you be logged in more then one device.

[sPOiDar]

Yeah, that'll be my plan too, but not until pass-through is more reliable.

[Roach]

Originally posted by sPOiDar:

Yeah, that'll be my plan too, but not until pass-through is more reliable.

Even in a simple homeserver running windows would be nice too.

[Construct]

Originally posted by MonkeyRoach:

Yes, I have but it will only work if steam will let you be logged in more then one device.

Or One master account with each of the back end nodes using an account that is linked with account sharing to the master account. :)

[sPOiDar]

Originally posted by MonkeyRoach:

Even in a simple homeserver running windows would be nice too.

Well, that will definitely work, but some of us already have virt infrastructure at home, so consolidating there without having to run additional hardware (beyond a GPU) is desirable.

[Construct]

With all of this coming out i have i have started looking at hyper-v a little more as it appears to have the best vGPU implementations currently out there. Maybe a purchase of one of ESXs supported NVIDIA TESLA grids would make sense for a house hold gaming backend system.

[Construct]

Originally posted by sPOiDar:

Originally posted by MonkeyRoach:

Even in a simple homeserver running windows would be nice too.

Well, that will definitely work, but some of us already have virt infrastructure at home, so consolidating there without having to run additional hardware (beyond a GPU) is desirable.

This is the main reason i want this setup move everything into my esx cluster/ which has 10Gbe fiber to a ZFS fileserver so there would also be gains for disk speed for me. Also i could save to total disk space by having each back end node mount the same ISCSI volume that contains my entire steam library.

[sPOiDar]

Originally posted by Construct:

With all of this coming out i have i have started looking at hyper-v a little more as it appears to have the best vGPU implementations currently out there. Maybe a purchase of one of ESXs supported NVIDIA TESLA grids would make sense for a house hold gaming backend system.

ATI cards apparently work alright under Xen or KVM VFIO, but nVidia cards still have problems for the time being. Sorry, don't know anything about proprietary virt.

Originally posted by Construct:

Also i could save to total disk space by having each back end node mount the same ISCSI volume that contains my entire steam library.

Uh, that'd have to be read-only or on a clustered filesystem though, right? So, that doesn't seem practical...

[Construct]

Originally posted by sPOiDar:

Originally posted by Construct:

With all of this coming out i have i have started looking at hyper-v a little more as it appears to have the best vGPU implementations currently out there. Maybe a purchase of one of ESXs supported NVIDIA TESLA grids would make sense for a house hold gaming backend system.

ATI cards apparently work alright under Xen or KVM VFIO, but nVidia cards still have problems for the time being. Sorry, don't know anything about proprietary virt.

I have several AMD HD7XXX cards working under ESX 5.5. But NVIDIA GRID has native ESX drivers allowing it to do vGPU which would allow you to have one GPU serve as the rendering backend for several Steam Streaming nodes. I prefer the grid approach because it allows you to better leverage hardware resources with many VMs assigned to one GPU instead of passthrough which would require a 1 VM to 1 GPU assignment.

[MrMagic]

Originally posted by MonkeyRoach:

Yes, I have but it will only work if steam will let you be logged in more then one device.

It would actually be quite awkward to get your friends to sign in and also have about 30 mins of updating after that. Best of luck with your project though!

[Construct]

Originally posted by TheMagicalManiac:

Originally posted by MonkeyRoach:

Yes, I have but it will only work if steam will let you be logged in more then one device.

It would actually be quite awkward to get your friends to sign in and also have about 30 mins of updating after that. Best of luck with your project though!

Thats why you have a large library of games installed onto a single shared drive so updating would be minimal. The sign in could be a little awkward but it would still be better then trying to play a newer game on intgrated graphics. Plus if it works out well enough it might be worth it to develop some scripts/web interface to provide an easier method of signing into a backend steam node.

[MrMagic]

I wonder how good the streaming would be at launch and if you could play with good latency like the Nvidia Shield.

[Jacqyl Frost 🩵 小百合の]

I'm gonna have to keep an eye on this thread, you guys have the same idea I do, but you've got the implementation worked out better.

[Construct]

Originally posted by TheMagicalManiac:

I wonder how good the streaming would be at launch and if you could play with good latency like the Nvidia Shield.

Given that steam streaming is based off Nvidia streaming i expect it will work pretty well.

[Construct]

Originally posted by sPOiDar:

Originally posted by Construct:

With all of this coming out i have i have started looking at hyper-v a little more as it appears to have the best vGPU implementations currently out there. Maybe a purchase of one of ESXs supported NVIDIA TESLA grids would make sense for a house hold gaming backend system.

ATI cards apparently work alright under Xen or KVM VFIO, but nVidia cards still have problems for the time being. Sorry, don't know anything about proprietary virt.

Originally posted by Construct:

Also i could save to total disk space by having each back end node mount the same ISCSI volume that contains my entire steam library.

Uh, that'd have to be read-only or on a clustered filesystem though, right? So, that doesn't seem practical...

To solve the concurrent access issues you present i intend on using windows enhanced write filter. Which allows you to mount a read only volume and redirect all writes to local storage. additionally i dont think to much writing is done to the steam game library folder while running a game i would think that most games would work just fine off a read only volume, but it would cause problems with updating.