this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
98 points (95.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40006 readers
717 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Mainly because running multiple desktop machines adds up to a lot of power, even at idle. If you power them off and on as needed it's better, but then it's not as convenient. Of course, if you leave a single machine with multiple GPUs on 24/7 that will also eat a lot of power, but it will be less than multiple machines turned on 24/7 at least.

And the physical space taken up by multiple desktop machines starts to add up significantly, particularly if you live in an apartment or smaller house.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 4 months ago

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it's two instances at most, so... I don't know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It'd pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you're only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you're playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that's the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I've done that before for that reason.

I suppose it's why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.