My Gaming PC is a VM

Published on 2023-11-29; Last edited on 2023-12-01

Tags: Server

Virtualization of computers isn't really a new concept. In fact, it's almost as old as computers themselves. From what I could find on the internet it dates back to at least 1967.

Well, after all that time virtualization made it from big mainframes filling entire rooms right to my desktop!

But before I start telling you about how my gaming PC is just a virtual machine, I need to go back in time by a few years.

My NAS evolution

Back in simpler times I thought to myself: "Why don't I build my own NAS?"

And thus, a great journey started with me throwing together a few old computer parts, four 4TB HDDs and a copy of Freenas (now known as Truenas).

It didn't take long until I also wanted to run a few virtual machines. Freenas did support those, but it wasn't the best experience. At the time I also got access to a windows server datacenter license through school. This got me to install windows server on the bare metal, with freenas running inside a VM, with all the HDDs passed through. With the datacenter license you also essentially get unlimited windows server VMs licensed for free, which was pretty nice for playing around.

But of course, hyper-v got old pretty fast, so I moved to another hypervisor: vmware ESXi. It at least felt a lot better as its purpose made and not just some functionality "tacked on" (at least that's how hyper-v always feels to me). Another benefit was that we also use ESXi at work, so I got to play a little bit around without having to worry about breaking things. This turned out to be less helpful than I initially thought as the ESXi interface differs quite a lot from vsphere, the piece of software that controls our cluster of multiple ESXi hosts.

Eventually I royally f'ed up by creating a datastore that used storage from my freenas VM. Using storage supplied by a VM for a datastore is a really bad idea as I learned after the next restart! I'm not sure anymore how I managed to get myself out of that situation. What I do know is that it didn't take long after that incident to search for a new alternative again.

Introducing unraid: A NAS operating system featuring better virtualization support, as well as the capability of running docker containers! There even is a huge marketplace offering prepackaged software. What really got me hooked was its ease of use. With some IT knowledge you can easily set up a functioning NAS that does more than just store files.

I was finally happy with this solution for multiple years.

There was always one thing I didn't quite enjoy about unraid however: It's performance. See, unraid sets itself apart with a special kind of raid. Instead of striping data across multiple drives, it "manually" distributes whole files between your drives. Your data is then kept save using one or two parity drives that only store parity information. This approach means that in the case of a fatal number of drive failures only data from failed drives is lost, instead of all data stored on the array. Another benefit is that you can mix and match different drive capacities. The only rule that applies is that the parity drive(s) need to be at least the same size as the largest data drive. On the flip side, it's quite a bit slower as files are only ever written and read from single drives, instead of using multiple drives at once. I also had my HDDs spin down after a time of inactivity for noise reasons. This meant that the first access to a HDD always took ages as the drive first needed to spin up.

Browsing around on ebay, as one does, I found some incredible deals around used enterprise grade SSDs. The specific ones I was interested in where 8TB u.2 SSDs. The u.2 form factor is really interesting, because it allows for NVME SSDs to fit in 2.5" drive slots. All you need is a HBA PCIe Card that supports u.2 or a little adapter that literally just splits up a x16 PCIe slot into four x4 u.2 connections.

I often heard bad things about unraid running on purely SSD storage and I also wanted something new again.

This time I had the idea of combining my PC and NAS into a single machine. This really makes a lot of sense if you think about it. My PC is quite powerful with an AMD Ryzen 5950x 16 core processor and 64GB of RAM. That should be plenty of room for some VMs.

My PC evolution

Of course, while my NAS evolved over time, my PC did too.

At some point I decided that I wanted to try this Linux thing as my main operating system. I was actively trying to make youtube videos during that time and my (at the time) favorite video editing program Adobe Premiere Pro of course doesn't run on Linux. This caused me to dual boot, first just for Adobe stuff, but later I used windows more and more again, due to some small random issues I had with my Linux install.

Some time later I tried Linux again, first with Pop!_OS, just like the first time, and later with Arch. During this second try I also stopped making youtube videos, so I didn't need to dual boot for windows anymore! That first Arch install is actually what I am still using daily 2.5 years later!

My streak of gaming on Linux was only broken by my desire to play Forza Horizon after I saw how well it ran on the steam deck. Critically, the steam deck uses an AMD GPU while I have one from nvidia, which seems to be a problem for Forza specifically. I tried many things, but eventually I stumbled over something I hadn't previously considered. Running a windows VM with GPU passthrough. Well, I thought about it earlier, but heard that you need a separate GPU for passthrough, which I don't have. This time however I found out that you don't actually need a second GPU. You can actually just kill your desktop session and unload the graphics driver from the host operating system before starting the VM! One afternoon of trying my best to follow this guide later I was up and running with a windows VM that really felt like a bare metal machine.

My current setup

With all the knowledge gained about virtualization under Linux I felt more comfortable combining my PC and NAS into a single machine.

As the hypervisor I chose something completely new to me: Proxmox! It's a fully featured, Linux based hypervisor that's also using KVM and Qemu just like my windows gaming VM setup.

I then created a couple VMs for running Truenas as my NAS again, OPNsense as a router/firewall and a docker one for running different containers. And then there are two more VMs with GPU passthrough configured: One with windows, and one with Linux. They also have all USB controllers, Audio interfaces and the WiFi Card (for bluetooth) passed through as well. The linux VM also has my m.2 SSD passed through, so I didn't have to reinstall my main operating system. This works mostly flawless, apart from the VM failing to locate my GRUB. I still have to manually load it through the boot maintenance manager.

One issue I knew I was going to run into, was starting the VM I wanted to use. Without a VM to interact with this was not very easy. My first solution was to use an unofficial Proxmox App on my phone. It wasn't as user friendly as I wanted it to be, however. My second solution was much cooler and is also what I still rely on: The iOS shortcuts app. It's a really powerful app allowing you to automate your iPhone. One of the many things it can do is send ssh commands to other hosts on your network, which I used to create a shortcut that sends a start VM command via ssh to my Proxmox server.

Conclusion

It's actually really cool how you don't realize that you're "only" interacting with a VM when just using it normally. This setup also removes some of the potential issues of dual-booting, like windows update messing with GRUB. And of course, I now only have one physical tower taking up valuable space.