I have a room with 30 thinclients currently running Windows with the possibility to open RDP sessions.
The current setup using VMWare is slow even for 2D content. That is why I want to replace it with Proxmox. What can I expect? I suspect the current setup is using SAN, I want to go ZFS on local drives.
I experimented in a homelab on KVM to see how fast the VMs can become. With 8 cores Google Earth becomes somewhat usable over RDP. But imagine 30 students using it on the same VM. The VM is Debian 13 btw.
I also experiemented with spice and 3D acceleration, but it works only locally and does not support multiple logins. What other options do I have. Even when I setup the VM to use virgl it uses software rendering over RDP. I thought of replacing the Windows on the thinclients with Linux, but then I would need individual VMs for every student and a secure spice session. Is that even possible? I would need a potent GPU in the server, maybe more than one. Is a 64 core CPU and 512 GB RAM enough for 30 students?
I’ve read that proxmox uses temporary .vv files for noVNC in the browser. I hope this can be setup permanently to be accessible over the network.
Any advice or new ideas are welcome!
That is awesome! Thanks for posting. I wonder what the B60 will be able to do! According to the video though this is only good for about 8 VMs at a time and gets a little sketchy/unstable if multiple VMs are trying to max it out. It seems this is early days and the drivers aren’t finalized but the future looks bright. This could be a nice addition to a home lab.
I don’t think sr-iov even officially in the drivers yet, I would give it a few months to mature. The performance is probably enough for 8 VMs with google earth tho, but you would probably need multiple for 30 people.