Gadgetory

so recently we created a two-in-one machine for twitch streamers using on raid and virtualization to capitalize on the hike or count of Intel's Core i9 processors and the results got us wondering well just what other practical applications could such a set up have also you guys were wondering just how we got the whole thing working so thanks to Intel sponsoring this follow-up project we are about to boldly go where very few men have gone before and create a triple headed vr gaming set up with the whole thing running off of one tower and actually one CPU as you probably know vr gaming is a demanding workload for both your CPU and your GPU so when we set out to put together a system that could not only run triple AVR titles like Star Trek bridge crew but actually handle three instances concurrently we knew we were gonna need the best of the best so we'll start with the CPU if we were running a single instance of bridge crew a modern processor like an intel core i7 8700 k would be a great choice but since we're running free and we need a couple of course left over for our hypervisor we chose the Intel Core I 979 60 X so you can actually see with all three of our gaming rigs running at about 70 to 90 percent utilization this CPU is still capable of running at nearly 4 gigahertz which means no dropped frames in our game due to CPU bottlenecks afraid to touch this thing too hard it's a little fragile anyway 4 ran we went with 64 gigs of 32 hundred megahertz g.skill Trident ddr4 in a quad channel configuration and that last bit is important because it allows us to give 16 gigs of memory to each of our gaming rigs with some left over and while very few desktop workloads benefit from quad channel memory when three demanding workloads are hitting it at once well it's a lot more important than usual to have all the bandwidth you can get now for our graphics cards we actually ended up with a mixture of different Nvidia V are capable cards ranging from the gtx 1070 all the way up to the titan XP now the point we were trying to make here using different cards is that as long as we have enough CPU and memory resources and they're above a certain threshold it actually doesn't matter what mixture of video cards we use now the motherboard on the other hand was a really important piece of the puzzle you can't always count on virtualization features to be implemented correctly in the UEFI BIOS so we turned to the same asus prime x2 99 deluxe from our gaming and streaming combo machine now let's look at some special pieces that we needed for this config one of the limitations of KVM the underlying virtualization tech the done raid uses is that if you pass a USB device through to a virtual machine like say for example a mouse it won't be hot pluggable by default and if you have more than one of the same peripheral like all of our vibes they would all have to be passed through to the same VM which obviously wouldn't have worked very well for our demo of three people running their own discrete copies of the game in multiplayer mode fortunately this guy right here this thing exists it's a single USB PCIe expansion card that has four discrete controller chips on it so that means each of them can be passed through to a separate VM without any performance bottlenecking then this is cool when you pass the whole controller through to a VM you also get hot-plug support so we just used a few cheap hubs and now each of our VMs can have multiple USB devices all of which are hot pluggable next up is another sort of KVM but this one has nothing to do with virtualization this right here is the level one tax for port KVM switch it is super expensive at over 300 US dollars but it's DisplayPort 1.2 meaning that it is 4k 60 Hertz compatible and apparently it even works with free sync and gsync if both your connected monitor and graphics part support them now it wasn't strictly speaking necessary but it allowed us to use a single monitor keyboard and mouse to quickly switch between all of our virtual machines for configuration using this console right here finally we've got our handy dandy blinders here see if one vive headset can see both its own lighthouses and another one you are gonna have a bad time and then we had some weird timeout issues with our rifts even on a certified USB controller so we just put up these cloths now we can walk you guys through the steps required to set up a configuration like this first we need to land in the unread webui where we'll assign an SSD cache to run our VMs off of and hey did I mention before we've got four cores and 16 gigs of ram left 4 unread well we can use 60 terabytes worth of Seagate's 12 terabyte iron wolf pros and throw those in an on Radar a where they can safely store personal data off the public cloud or even serve up transcoded media files via plex then what we're gonna do is jump into the VMS tab where we need to configure our basic VMs set up pass-through for our graphics cards this is kind of the special unrated sauce that allows high performance gaming in VMs and setup pass-through for our USB controllers from there we need some KVM specific drivers for Windows and then it is mostly business as usual keep in mind though that without three discreet sound cards you'll be relying on the HDMI audio built into your graphics card or in our case the USB audio device built into your VR headset oh and here's a special headache we got to experience you see we had to fit three dual slot video cards and the USB card into a six slot motherboard now normally on raid needs an additional video card for itself bringing the total card count to more than the board physically has so we solved that issue by grabbing the primary cards BIOS modifying it and then presenting that BIOS to unweight as if it was an actual card yay virtual graphics card for a mainstream board with onboard graphics this step would probably be unnecessary but with a CPU that fits to a mainstream board this kind of performance wouldn't be possible so this was the most elegant workaround that we could find and quite honestly it's pretty darn elegant every one of our VMs is capable of delivering a smooth steady vr gaming experience concurrently and this is all thanks to the recent drop in price not to mention increase in clock speeds of high core count desktop CPUs and virtualization technology so a huge thanks to Intel for sponsoring this demo and the folks are done RAID for helping us out whenever we got stuck John you rock and Tom and Eric you guys are cool too so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join