Best CentOS Server Setup For Graphics Intensive Kvm Vms?

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Hallo list

I’ve been running fedora for donks as my production laptop os, but now I want to set up one of those old laptops to run as a home server running a number of home type vm appliances. I don’t want to risk having to tear down and rebuild the setup every 6 months to a year –
so, figure CentOS is my best canditate to run as a stable server.

The sort of home type vms I envisage running include:
LibreELEC https://libreelec.tv/
Vortexbox https://wiki.vortexbox.org/available_images ownCloud https://owncloud.org/download/#owncloud-server-appliance freeSwitch https://freeswitch.org/pages/vm.html Etc…

Without wanting to start a very competative discussion – what would be a suggested minimal CentOS 7 install to provide such a server?

My main area of confusion is whether I need a gui on the server for kodi?

Many thanks for any answers to this wildly open ended question!

M

6 thoughts on - Best CentOS Server Setup For Graphics Intensive Kvm Vms?

  • You’d need to run virt-manager GUI somehow to manage the VMs. If you run Fedora already on another machine then you can just yum install it and use it from there.

    You might run into a problem though with your Libreelec VM as you’d need to enable GPU passthrough for it and for that you need Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi enabled in the BIOS. If your laptop is old it may not have that feature.

    Owncloud has been obsoleted by Nextcloud btw.

    hth

  • Thanks Nux for the follow up!

    That’s what I figured – I already run an XP and W7 virt machines as well as sometimes RemixOS just for fun on my everyday machine and thought I
    could remote control.

    the above GUI machines on my laptop without VT-d, then shouldn’t I be able to run Libreelec? Or, is it that I will just need the server/host setup with a gui? And, if that’s the case, then perhaps I run Libreelec on the server/host and not as a VM and the rest as VM?

    Can’t keep up – getting old…

    Many thanks Morgan.

  • Running a VM with something graphical on top of something else graphical is one thing.

    What you want is to dedicate the GPU to the Libreelec VM, so it displays directly to the screen (gpu) so it can properly use hardware acceleration and so on, but you can’t do that without VT-d/AMD-Vi afaik.

  • Hmm, So – I guess the best I can hope for is running the host as a full workstation GUI with kodi installed – forget about Libreelec – and then running the rest of appliances as VMs headless?

    Many thanks for helping clear my thoughts on this. M

  • Nux, thanks for you help.

    I’ve been following and adapting this guide as necessary:
    http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_on_Fedora_25_using_RPMFusion_packages Until the point where it says to install kodi… There is no kodi in RPMFusion repo for CentOS, only Fedora… But, I see that you are wrapping kodi for CentOS. After a little searching I came across your repos here:
    http://mirrors.coreix.net/li.nux.ro/nux/tmp/kodi717/

    My questions
    – can I use your repo as a drop in for the Fedora kodi repo at RPM Fusion?
    – what’s the difference between kodi7/ and kodi717/ ?

    Many thanks Morgan.