I have a bunch of kids (5), and a bunch of laptops (total of 7 including mom & dads). My video games (Civ V, Xcom) run pretty slow on our laptops (AMD A quad core, 8GB RAM, 512 MB onboard ATI 512 Mb video, $350 cheap laptops) connected via wireless lan to fios. Rather than buying new laptops, I was considering building a tower and installing ubuntu to host multiple VDIs for each kid on their own laptop. This would theoretically move the CPU and GPU work off the laptop and onto a box I build that is more suitable (and cheaper than buying a bunch of new laptops. The tower I am thinking of building would look like this: AMD FX 8320 8 core, 16 Gb 1600 GHz ram, saphire radion hd 7870 2 GB 256 bit, SATA III HD. I am familiar with ESXI from work, but almost totally ignorant about ubuntu.
My questions:
- Will Ubuntu VDI use the GPU of the tower effectively and run windows games well in multiple VDIs?
- Will this configuration take advantage of multiple GPUs (if I chose to buy a 2nd or third GPU) configured with CrossfireX?
- Do I have to buy a windoze license for each VDI to be legal? The kids games and school software all run on windows only.
- Does anyone know of a VDI server that already does this, so that I don't have to build one. I would gladly pay a few dollars a month to use a VDI with some GPU horsepower.
