Question About VirtualBox and multiple work stations

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punkncat

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I have been messing with VirtualBox for a few weeks. Very new to it, very basic setup so I don't have a full idea of it's capability. Bear with me here.
I am not to a stage of actual equipment selection as I am not sure what I want to do is something I, or the "program" is capable of. Thoughts along the lines of utilizing a Ryzen 7 1700 and RAM I already have on hand. Motherboard and case specific to my GPU requirements. I have 4x 750ti half height cards.

I have a remote office location that will need to have at least two, and ideally four separate work stations. The location is not particularly secure in that quite a few people have access, it's also our warehouse. What my idea is, without a full understanding of the possibilities, to have one tower/case inside a ventilated lock box, secured to the floor. I don't feel like if the only things in view are monitors and keyboard/mouse that any of it would be messed with. I know the "easy" solution to my situation would be to have laptops which could be carried out but that leads to other issues and quite a bit of expense.

Two of my work stations will need two monitors. The other two only one monitor. The VM's will be on a shared SSD (~1TB) with one big SSD(2TB) or HDD (4TB) being used as a "mapped" drive for storage for all. The physical tower will be using 10 pro so that it can be remoted into from the VM, each of the VM on 10 home. There will be a shared printer/scanner for all the machines to have access to. For ease and expense of license it would be best to work one desktop from the physical machine and the other (3) from VM.

My very basic understanding is that I will need a dedicated GPU for each workstation, which can be allocated along with disk space, ram, and such as I set up the VM? (my current VM is on iGPU)

Beyond that, how do I allocate the keyboard/mouse to each specific VM?

If you could link me to some basic manner of reading on the subject it may help to clear quite a bit of this up.
Thanks
 
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punkncat

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Is this a situation where no one knows, or am I just missing something terribly obvious?

I noted while trying to allocate a USB port specifically to a VM that I never could get that aspect to work. I figured that is what would need to happen for a keyboard and mouse to operate.
 

punkncat

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The original idea is to have 1 computer running (4)VM workstations. They will all be on (Win 10) Home. The physical computer on Pro such that I can use one of the workstations to remote in for maint. tasks.
Thinking further into it, I am not sure that would be ideal given the restrains I am going to have on room for GPU, so probably will cut that to (3) VM workstations and one (desktop/workstation) running directly off the physical machine.

I have a very basic understanding of how to make the GPU work with each individual machine as I have seen that aspect in the setup portion of the VM, where you also allocate disk space, memory, cores, etc.
I have also seen where you can (supposedly) allocate specific USB ports to the VM, which I would assume would allow for the keyboard/mouse to be along with, to be specific to that machine (VM). The issue here is that on the testbed machine I have been playing with this on, I cannot get the USB port to work.
 

USAFRet

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Read through here, particularly Step 3 (USB)
 
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punkncat

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Hrm….so reading through the above provided link/tutorial on how "they" did it indicates that my 750ti may not be able to be utilized in that way. That sucks, since I already have them. I am also going to have to check that the R7 1700 and it's motherboard supports virtualization. I note my current 2700x rig and mobo do....

Looks like my first bit of homework will be to take the Intel based test rig I am using this program on for now and attempt to set up (2) VM on it just to see a bit about the trial and error aspect of what I am looking to do. I noted there was some info about what to do in order to have the VM actually see the USB 2.0 so therein may lie my current issue with that.

Thank you USAFRet for the link to the article.
 
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