I scrapped my plans for a hypervisor a while ago when I found my original graphics card and new gfx card BOTH do not support FLReset.
Essentially it lets the hypervisor reboot my gfx card and give it to one of the virtual machines.

Without that, I can’t make a gaming hypervisor.

But now I’ve got another idea…

Instead of making my personal PC a hypervisor for testing/gaming, I’ll upgrade my gaming rig and use the spare parts to make that hypervisor!

So now here’s the new plan:

• Keep upgrading my PC until I have enough parts to built a server
• I have enough hard drives laying around for storage
• Using Xen as my hypervisor I can do PCI Passthru
• Decommission my current NAS and create a virtual machine to become my new one, using OpenMediaVault (handle files, FTP, BitTorrent, Plex Media Server, etc)
• Use passthru for OMV so it can control some of the hard drives in the system and make a software RAID out of them. I don’t need super speed on this device, but I do need it to manage the HDs.
  • This way I can manage the partitions and re-size should I add to the pool, it doesn’t seem to like working with virtual disks.
  • This will require a separate RAID card, nothing fancy, just 4 ports.
• Create a web server VM for myself and my wife to learn web programming
  • Minimal server, just enough to run Apache/nginx, MySQL, PHP and SVN
• Create a Windows 2012 server so I can use LDAP to manage users across multiple platforms, and learn more about MS server OS’s
• Create several desktop OS VMs for testing and troubleshooting (on demand only)
• Possibly create a “work” VM so I can configure it to work from home if I need to; since RDP works with multi-monitor it’s even more usable!

This will take a ton of RAM and most likely require me to max out the RAM my current motherboard can do (16 GB). But it’s relatively inexpensive.

The CPU will be a Phenom II X4 955, don’t need super CPU power, Plex would be the most demanding and it would only be simple transcoding for streaming media.

My timeline for this project o be complete is before Q3 of 2014.

Wish me luck!