Modern VDI on Proxmox: ZFS Reliability and GPU Acceleration at Lower Cost

Leveraging GPUs to provide accelerated modern VDI without software lock-in or burdensome licenses.

Allan Jude, Klara Co-founder and Head of Solutions Architecture, is joined by Wendell Wilson, Founder & Lead Architect at Level1Techs, to share their insights on Proxmox and ZFS, the open-source hypervisor and storage stack. 

Learn about the practical implications of using modern VDI to provide a more secure and robust environment for your users, while leveraging GPU acceleration for performance, and ZFS fast dedup to maximize efficiency. 

What You’ll Learn:

• Advantages of hyper-converged ZFS+Proxmox 
• What is modern VDI, and why is it important 
• Applying GPU Acceleration to VMs 
• How to leverage ZFS Fast Dedup with Proxmox 

Top Questions from the Session—Answered!

  In a GPU-backed VDI setup, does Proxmox require a separate GPU for the host and another for the VMs?

     With SR-IOV, the GPU is divided into multiple virtual functions that you can each be given to a VM, while the root function remains so as not to take the GPU away from the Proxmox console itself. 

Many server boards also include an embedded management GPU (for IPMI), so even if passing the entire GPU to a specific VM, a separate card is often unnecessary.

 How many virtual desktops can one GPU actually support, and what bandwidth is required?

     This is entirely dependent on the hardware, driver, and licensing. An Intel B60 GPU provides up to 7 virtual functions per card. For network bandwidth, each desktop stream using H.264 is roughly ~6 Mbps peak, and often lower in real-world use — meaning 7 desktops per GPU can run comfortably under 100 Mbps total bandwidth.

Date: February 18, 2026

Time: 11:00 AM EST 

Duration: 50 minutes.