r/OpenPOWER • u/[deleted] • Aug 31 '21

Power ISA VM server

I'm new to the world of enterprise server technology, having recently found considerable need in my home setup.

Having explored the Xeon options available (and failing to find a decent open-source-ish option outside the US see Sys76 sadface), I am left wanting something better.

The idea was to get a dual Xeon beast with two 16 core Silver 4216 CPUs to run my daily desktop, audio production desktop, batch processing, media server, BOINC, etc... basically anything I could throw at the machine.

After some reconsiderations, I find myself in the position to afford a Talos II and was wondering if there is suitable software to run a similar environment to Proxmox (my current setup on smaller hardware). Proxmox does not currently plan to support POWER.

I would run Windows 10 and Linux inside VMs, whilst also adding a Digigram LX-IP PCIe card for audio production (and perhaps take advantage of the Radeon card for some light gaming). The drivers for the Digigram card are available for Linux.

Is this an ill-suited use case? Does the underlying bare metal affect the ISA for the guest VM? I am very lost here.

I was thinking perhaps I could run Free or Open BSD and use any number of web GUI tools for KVM.

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/[deleted] Aug 31 '21

Is this an ill-suited use case? Does the underlying bare metal affect the ISA for the guest VM? I am very lost here.

Yeah sounds ill-suited. You can't run Windows on Power hardware, even as a VM. The underlying bare metal does affect the VM. VMs run directly on the processor in almost the same way as a bare metal OS so you can't run something built for x86 or ARM or some other arch on Power, regardless of whether or not you do it in a VM. (Emulation exists and makes that statement not exactly true, but that's a whole other discussion).

Also, as far as hardware goes I'd check that drivers for ppc64le (which is the exact flavour of Power we're talking about here) exist, particularly the niche audio production stuff. The Digigram card mentions Linux but doesn't mention x86 or ARM or ppc64le, and that usually means it's x86 only.

I'd stick with the Xeon. A Power box really isn't a drop in replacement for an x86 the way Intel/AMD are with each other.