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10 gpu's passed to VM's in 1 box STUNT

A project log for The HYDRA multiheaded virtual computer

The HYDRA is a computing platform using a small footprint Hypervisor to run 1-6 (or more) hardware assisted virtual machines of any x86 OS

ericeric 01/19/2016 at 16:280 Comments

Thought I'd try and jam as many GPU's in 1 box as possible, out of what I have laying around.

The hard part was finding 10 working GPU's that are passthrough capable. I had to move some fans from Geforce cards to Radeons that had stuck fans.

I am using the PLX PEX 8508 8-lane, 5-port PCI Express Switch RDK (PCIe 1x to 4 PCIe 16x) to "fan out" the slots to accommodate all the cards . I bought 2 of these for $25 on ebay (haven't seen that price again) and am using the working one. The other has a fried cap (at least). I might try to fix it....

Also, when you pass PCI cards (not PCIe), you have to pass ALL PCI devices to one VM. So I had to pass 2 FX5200's to one XP VM. (no win7 driver from Nvidia for these, and I'm not putting vista on it). For some reason, although both work individually, I can't get a display on both of them. Maybe it's because the cards are identical, and the Nvidia driver gets confused? I could try an HP lights out board with VGA, it's really a computer by itself.....

So I added some lines to the XP's vmx to hide it's "virtualness", and installed VMWare Workstation. With an xp VM this makes 10 VM's .

Also running Mac OSx & Android Kit Kat, plus 6 Win7's.


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