I’m looking at adding a GPU to my XCP-NG machine and wanted some feedback on recommendations.
I am going to be using a Dell R630 for XCP-NG and currently have a Tesla P4 GPU, but want something slightly larger since I’ll want to host a local LLM, do video transcoding and other smaller GPU based tasks within the different services I plan to self-host.
My idea was to purchase a Tesla T4 since it’s 2x the GPU capacity, but I recently found that there is an Nvidia A2 for a slightly better price, same 16GB GPU RAM though.
I’m definitely open to hearing y’alls opinion regarding this, and if there are any other recommendations I’m open to hearing them!
I was actually considering that option too, so the AI stuff lives on a single GPU and the rest of the work goes on the other GPU, or just have the GPU passthrough on xcp-ng for all of my VMs so they can share both GPUs.
It does look like I can use Riser 2 and Riser 3 in my R630 for this too. It’ll negotiate down from the A2’s Gen 4 to the R630 Gen 3 PCIe speeds, but that’ll be sufficient for the stuff I intend on doing.
Hi @angel - be aware that you can only pass a PCIe device (your GPU) through to a single VM. Once that VM ‘owns’ the PCIe device, no other VMs can use that same PCIe device.
You mentioned LLM, transcoding, and other smaller GPU tasks. I’ve done something similar, where I bought a RTX 2000 Ada, passed that through to a Linux VM, and installed all my services on that one VM (Ollama, OpenwebUI, Jellyfin). I kept the VM’s virtual disk to just a 20GB OS, and stored all the models, apps and media elsewhere, to keep it light and easy to backup/recover.
If you can get multiple GPUs, great - pass them through to different VMs and split the workloads. Pricing is insane so you’re right to focus on VRAM, even on older cards. Favour the GPU memory over the GPU performance - but all within balance and all depending on what you’re expecting.
