Installing 3 workplaces at one PC

Hello everyone) After watchign Linus videos about installing several work places at one PC I want to do by myself)



I actually need for 2 Autocad (+3d Autocad workers) and for me for video edditig videos from the trips and from the Chromakey in Davinci Resolve (free version).

image.png.c92541170b808150bffd41416a2e0bd9.png (34.82 KiB) Viewed 1676 times

I tried to visualize it. If somebody uderstand what I want to archive I'll be happy to receive any recommendations)

The software may be UnRaid, Microsoft Multipoint Server 2016.


left - the server specs

right - 3 rooms of each worker



ps: I really want and hope on the BlackFriday it'll be discounts)



The plan is: install the unRaid software and after that install Windows 10 PRO on each of the machines and use them just by turning on the monitors at work places)

Don't do this. Linus does it as a stunt because it makes for a good video, but one 8700K is not enough to run three workstations using demanding software, and maintaining it is a nightmare. VDI is expensive.

Don't do this. Linus does it as a stunt because it makes for a good video, but one 8700K is not enough to run three workstations using demanding software, and maintaining it is a nightmare. VDI is expensive.

Heh looks I have no other way that just buy separate worksataions?

Hi.

I read your post that you normally run Autocad in the daytime on your system and from time to time want to run Free version of Resolve in the evening. I don't know if that is correct?

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O and compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.

But first your i7-8700K CPU. It is below recommendation for Resolve if you want to use Resolve to do UHD/4K editing or grading.
Some time in 2017 I read about somebody who Overclocked it to nearly 5 Ghz and using Water cooling.

Then your P4000 Quadro. I expect it to have 8 GB vRam. So I expect it to be able to do UHD/4K, but at slow speed as it is under powered

A ATX 600 Watt Power Supply is also below what we normally uses in a Resolve desktop.

I have never heard of anybody running Resolve in a virtual PC. I don't expect it to work?

So my suggesting will be to make a dual boot and only run Resolve in Windows 10 on your main monitor.

Regards Carsten.

I am running an dual xeon unraid server with one of the virtual osx hosts beeing a resolve render server with an nvidia card passed thru as well as 10gb ether . Also a few other virtual hosts incl a windows host which like the osx host is also perfectly capable of running resolve at native speeds with hardware gpu acceleration , cuda etc etc. Works amazing and you can resize to your needs using VMs But your intended setup is way underpowered. Also lots of things to take care of besides power not in the least storage setup that goes way to far for this forum.
What you need is server grade stuff, lots and lots and lots of cores so you can devide these between the vm’s prefferably fast and lots of mem if you want to run the equivalent of 3 powerfull windows machines. The right motherboard that allows you to separate and pass thru pcie lanes to individual VM’s and the right usb interfaces that can be split to different VM’s as well. Same for network cards. Lots of usb hubs do not allow splitting. Unraid and hardware passthru is powerful but an art to understand as it will decide what you need to buy and what not. You need a dedicated gpu for each VM. You can not split individual oute between VMs nor is it alway possible to use motherboard gpu (at least not without issues )
If you want to know more about this stuff , you need to do a lot of research and go to the unraid / limetech forum . On the blackmagic forum there is little to no experience on this front (i may be the only one runing resolve in an unraid vm on the forum as far as i heard feedback on other posts if did) and what you need to know is not resolve specific.

P.s. So like others (but then more informed regarding unraid) i would advise you to not touch unraid or other similar solutions unless you are willing to invest a few months of study and lots more money to build this kind of server. If you do it right , it rock the socks of most standard setups and changes your perception of what is possible in current days. But it does take time, efford and care . Once setup i find it less maintenance then a standard server even and 10000 times more flexible.
But your best and simplest bet for now is indeed stick with a dual or even tripple boot setup.

Glenn Venghaus - I wonder if you might point me to specific info you're aware of with regards to running a Resolve instance on a virtual machine (VM) as a render engine?

Myself and 2 other editors are moving to Resolve inside a large corporate environment that has recently moved to Microsoft Azure for many things.

As a minimum I'm planning to have a dedicated performance machine to do our final delivery render but to also be our project server, pointing to a PostgreSQL instance hosted in Azure.

What I'd like to be able to do is to not have a physical and dedicated performance machine for the rendering, but to have that be a VM somewhere in Azure. Azure does have compute-intensive options & services including GPU clusters etc, but we're not a big customer for MS in the grand scheme of things so don't seem to have access to the support & knowledge needed... I know they've done rendering for big media & film companies, with big budgets - but that's not us...!

So, any help/guidance much appreciated!

Cheers

Martin

As far as my own experiences goes with Resolve running in a virtualised environement, there is just one key element. All the rest is nothing special and would be true for resolve on any enviroment.
What you need is a virtual solution that has true pcie gpu passthru capabilities so that resolve can drive the proper gpu’s native using the native drivers which then have proper acceleration (cuda/metal etc) Not via any virtualisation layer. The card will be invisible to the host and only be visible to the resolve vm.
From then on its like resolve on any physical hardware with the same rules.
Anything else can be via virtualisation layer , like network, cpu cores , mem etc so you can dynamicaly scale / distribute at will or also passed thru directly as you prefer.

If you go cloud options like azure you can then take a heavy single server with lots of (passed thru dedicated) gpu’s for example (as resolve does not do real clustering ) and virtual cpu cores as required for the type of media you throw at it. Or if you spread out over a few vm’s you can manualy schedule render jobs and spread equaly or use some scripting to do it for you and submit over the hosts.

Each host should obviously have access to all source media , the postgresql db as well as have any plugin installed that is used in the project. But as said that is nothing specific to VM’s

OS you can choose freely i would say and what makes most sense for your own inhouse experience.

P.s. i found very few if any online resources of people doing this with resolve as is still pretty rare and new. But since true pcie passtru became in reach , its a matter of time before more will realise and tap in the potential.
Virtualisation is the way of the future for just about anything. Every company i worked at and work at is investing or already heavily invested in it for almost any type of aplication.

I use Resolve 15.2 on my personal machine (love it!) and needed to install it on a VM for work (Azure) and I ran into all sorts of issues. I went with a standard NC6 offering (6 VCPUs, 56 Gb Ram, and a single GPU - Nvidia Tesla K80 and Windows 10 PRO v1803).

After installing the display drivers and Nvidia CUDA no joy running Resolve. After a day of troubleshooting, searching the DaVinci Forums and Microsoft's support forums I came to two conclusions: 1. Resolve is not designed to work on a VM in the Azure cloud 2. I would need to purchase an Adobe CC subscription for work (painful as I have become a huge fan of Resolve as a product and hate SaaS pricing models).

My company is a Citrix VDI shop and is in the process of migrating to the Azure Cloud so whatever I use for video editing has to run in the Cloud. My use case is probably on the tails of the standard distribution and I cannot tell you how disappointed I was when Resolve would not work on the VM and first try after installing Premiere Pro CC on the VM it fired up without issue and I am off to the races, so to speak.

Have zero Azure experience, and my main Resolve VM runs OSX Sierra, but also no issues on my windows 10 test VM (not that i use it for Resolve, but was just for testing) .
As mentioned earlier, the key for any VM / Resolve solution is proper full 100% pcie passthrough and no virtual layer in between. Otherwise no deal.
That way the OS and Resolve treats the card as native. For windows VM's (at least on qemu based setups) you also need to pass the vbios to the VM for most cards to get all features or have it working at all. For OSX not needed.
What exactly was your issue so we can troubleshoot a bit ?
And is there anything specific to an Azure cloud provided server that is affecting the proper workings ?