Quote from: FormerlyAnonymous on August 11, 2012, 05:21:29 PM

Dunno if this project is dead or what... but if you continue, for the software side, you might want to consider a Xen based platform. Xen is without doubt an ugly stepchild in the virtualization world, but it's been used extensively for PCI passthrough -- indeed, if I'm not mistaken, it even supported come crude virtual PCI passthrough capability before hardware IOMMUs came to market.

However I will warn you that Xen adds some complexity and if you're already struggling you might not like it. Another approach would be to get rid of Proxmox and use regular linux. If I were doing this myself, I would probably build it as a Gentoo system with a hand-configured kernel -- but again that's kinda complex.

I've tried proxmox and found it to be pretty buggy and fragile. Great concept, but they just need to do more work on their implementation. Everything seemed to be half-way implemented, so as soon as you deviated from the simple use-cases they designed it for, everything fell to pieces. Actually everything fell to pieces even when I tried to follow the simple guides in their wiki.

Proxmox is basically debian with an openvz kernel and a bunch of Red-Hat cluster software. You don't need the extra complexity that openvz or Red Hat cluster suite bring into the system -- you might have better luck just running ubuntu and kvm. It's not that hard -- just follow the guides in the wiki and you'll be 90% of the way there.

I understand the allure of a GUI like Proxmox, but often the "simplicity" offered by such tools is illusory and ends up acting more like a "complexity loan" -- installation will be easy, sure, but then try to actually /do/ anything and you will spend more time than you saved during installation working around all the bugs and limitations of whatever mysterious pile of software is sitting underneath that pretty GUI.

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, all of the video cards have been sold, although I do still have the rest of the platform (trying to figure out what the hell to do with it....). By the time that I got around to installing anything, KVM was repeatedly being lauded as the be-all, end-all solution, which is why I went with Proxmox. Unfortunately, that was right around a time when I got very busy and could no longer devote time to the project.

I would have preferred Xen, since I currently use the XenServer virtualization from Citrix for my other work stuff, and I know it better, but in either case it probably wouldn't have worked out anyways. I am not very good at Linux stuff in general, and slapping on a layer of complexity like hardware virtualization transformed the entire process into Greek to me.

It's possible that XenServer might work, but as far as I know the hardware virtualization requires an expensive license to use, and using open source Xen would be Greek all over again. Undecided

Sooo... I don't really know where to go from here. I have the board all wired into the PSU, ready to go, and I have almost 5kw of 12vdc available from 2 other PSUs (but no proper distribution bus or anything). I have an awesome frame built by Spotswood (http://richchomiczewski.wordpress.com/), the backplane itself, 2 host boards (one old one and one newer one), the 1200w PSU, and the two 2360w PSUs. At the beginning of the thread is a list of parts and the total that I have spent on all of them. Wonder if someone is interested in buying it...