EP039: Virtualization

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:13:17
Robbie
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And this week we're talking all about virtualization. Stay tuned.

00:00:13:19 - 00:00:32:15
Joey
This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at FlandersScientific.com

00:00:32:17 - 00:00:42:04
Robbie
All right. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Robbie Carman. And with me, as always, is Joey D’Anna. Hey, Joey, how are you, buddy?

00:00:42:06 - 00:00:44:00
Joey
Hey, everyone.

00:00:44:02 - 00:01:02:09
Robbie
Joey, this week we're gonna stay clearly in, a topic that is in your wheelhouse. And that is the idea of virtualization. And virtualization is something that's been talked a lot about in our industry and just general computing industries in general. And I think it's something that's kind of pretty new to probably most of our audience.

00:01:02:09 - 00:01:20:06
Robbie
But, you know, there's probably some people out there like, oh, yeah, I know all about, you know, running VMs and that kind of stuff. But we want to talk about it a little bit, today about how it affects individual users, how it affects workflow, and why Joey and I both kind of think it's kind of a little bit the future in sort of where our industry is moving to.

00:01:20:06 - 00:01:36:19
Robbie
But before we get into that, let's do a little housekeeping real quick. First and foremost, we have had a lot of feedback from you guys, about chapters in our episodes. Both chapters in the YouTube version as well as the audio files that make it out to all the various podcasting platforms. We have heard you loud and clear.

00:01:36:19 - 00:01:53:19
Robbie
I'm not sure why we've made this oversight for 38 episodes or whatever. But starting from this one out, we are definitely going to be, making sure that all the episodes have chapters, which is useful. And some of the longer ones if you need to navigate, specific topics. So thanks for, bearing with us.

00:01:54:01 - 00:02:09:08
Robbie
I don't know if we're going to go back and redo, all of the episode, sad chapters, but from this one on, we'll definitely, we'll definitely have chapters. Also, just as a side note, there is a new way that you can support the show if you choose to, if you like what you're hearing and want to, want to help us out.

00:02:09:14 - 00:02:25:19
Robbie
We have an option for buy me a coffee, which is just a euphemism, for, crowd, you know, crowd sourced funding and crowdsource support. You can head over to the link that you see here on screen, and we'll put it as well in the show notes. And if you do like to show a little support really goes a long way.

00:02:25:21 - 00:02:41:11
Robbie
It takes a lot of work to make these shows every two weeks, pretty much a year round with a little time off. So, any support that you have to offer, we sincerely, sincerely appreciate it. We couldn't do the show without you guys. And, of course, as always, you can head over to the offset podcast.com.

00:02:41:13 - 00:03:00:15
Robbie
Drop us a note if you have any ideas for a show, you want to check out some additional show notes. And that's kind of one of the best places to find sort of the library of past episodes as well. All right. So so let's get into talking about virtualization. Like I said, I think people kind of maybe have heard this term and certainly have heard the phrase VMs.

00:03:00:15 - 00:03:23:05
Robbie
Right. But let's start at the beginning of this conversation about kind of what the current landscape is, because when I think about the typical operator facility, you know, production company, whatever, you know, it's like, hey, we have a operator, we have a room and there's a computer or maybe multiple computers for that room. Right. And that computer has this processor has this connectivity.

00:03:23:05 - 00:03:43:16
Robbie
It has this OS, and that's the machine that that person works on day in, day out. They make, you know, good money doing it or whatever. That's the machine. What happens though, if we need to move that computer to another room? What happens if we go, wow, you know what, it would be great to have, you know, two more GPUs on this computer today.

00:03:43:18 - 00:04:02:16
Robbie
Because I got, you know, big render to do. Those kind of workflows have traditionally in the traditional setup, been very difficult because you're buying new hardware, you're adding more gear, you're unplugging things, moving it around. Would you agree that that's kind of the the current for most of us look of current lay of the land.

00:04:02:18 - 00:04:25:15
Joey
Yeah. So I like to kind of think of it as, a split between what is kind of the the server world and the end user world, where, you know, today most artists are still working on what we consider to be local hardware, whether that's a monster workstation in a machine room or that's just I'm editing something on a laptop.

00:04:25:21 - 00:04:49:11
Joey
You're still interacting directly with a computer to do your work. Now, years and years ago, let's go back 25, 30 years. It was like that for servers too. I remember the first like major IT network I set up for a post production facility. We had a huge storage network that handled all of the disks, and then we actually had individual servers.

00:04:49:12 - 00:05:17:09
Joey
The server was a piece of hardware for every single task that was needed. We had an Active Directory to manage the domain. That was one machine. Put it this way, these machines had two Xeon processors. I don't mean cores because these were single core processors. So this was a dual CPU, two rack unit. IBM server one was our domain controller, one was our email server.

00:05:17:09 - 00:05:38:20
Joey
Because cloud hosted email didn't exist back then, you had to kind of host it yourself. One was a database server which handled our scheduling system, and if resolve had existed back then, could have handled our resolve projects. And another one was a web server that handled our website and our web based review and approval platform that I had built.

00:05:39:01 - 00:06:06:22
Joey
So we're talking four servers running 24 over seven, each one with two power supplies, each one with all of the memory and CPU associated with running those services. And 90% of the time they were running at 0 or 1% utilization. So what virtualization means at its core is you take one big server, which is considered the host, the actual hardware.

00:06:07:00 - 00:06:37:21
Joey
Nowadays, we have dozens of cores in one chip. So, you know, you've got lots of resources available, lots of memory in a system and lots of possibly disk in a system as well. And you basically, instead of running an operating system directly on that hardware, you run what's called a hypervisor, which manages the system's resources and then runs what are called virtual machines that run each individual operating system.

00:06:37:21 - 00:07:06:04
Joey
So if you have, for example, a 24 core host server, you can say give four cores to this VM, eight cores to this VM, ten gigs of memory to this one, 20 gigs of memory to this one. And it lets you use one big expensive server to do many, many different things without touching each other. Now, this has been the standard practice for servers for over a decade, right?

00:07:06:04 - 00:07:28:01
Joey
Nobody wants to buy purpose built servers and put them in databases, or put them in data centers and have them sit at zero utilization for 90% of the time while you're burning money on electricity. Right? Right. It's very easy to virtualize servers because the user doesn't directly interact with them. Right? You can just say, okay, this is its IP address.

00:07:28:03 - 00:07:51:23
Joey
All of my workstations can now hit this IP address for my database, for example. Great. That works. Amazing. And that is transitioned from local to VMs to now what we see all over the industry is cloud based services. You go to Frame.io, Dropbox, Google Drive. All you're dealing with is somebody else's virtual server in their data center somewhere else.

00:07:51:23 - 00:08:17:21
Joey
The entire server world is basically virtualized now, but what we're talking about in this episode is virtualizing workstations in addition to the servers, which is it's something that exists, but it's been slow on the uptake because doing things like video and Wacom pans and sound has always been the hardest part of this kind of remote desktop solution. Yeah.

00:08:17:21 - 00:08:38:02
Robbie
So there's a lot to unpack about what you just said, but it's a good overview of kind of the idea of virtualization. I'll give you sort of my perspective on it. And that is, you know, I think for those who have come to know me over the years, I'm a big fan of, kind of, staying current on the latest and greatest machines and computers and that kind of stuff.

00:08:38:02 - 00:08:53:10
Robbie
And so generally what that means is at least the stuff and, you know, every, you know, three, two, 3 or 4 years, I'm like, oh, well, now I need to go and get the next generation and batch of computers, right. And I look at that every, every time that that comes up and go, wow. Well, I mean, let's just put a number on it.

00:08:53:10 - 00:09:17:21
Robbie
I need five new computers and it's going to cost, you know, it's going to be X amount of dollars a month, and it's going to be this amount of total. And it's every time I do it, it's like right. And I always every time I have this feeling, I have a flashback to what my first experience with workstation VMs, and, virtualization was, and that was about ten, 12 years ago.

00:09:17:23 - 00:09:39:03
Robbie
I was, along with a group of, some other trainer folks that I know. We went up to Major League Baseball up in New York City. Major League Baseball had just purchased, I think it used to be the old MSNBC, studios in New Jersey, and they said, this is going to be the new host. This isn't a new, facility for MLB and the network and all the shows they do and all the baseball stuff.

00:09:39:05 - 00:10:00:17
Robbie
And, they had this edict that we don't want to have a computer in the building. And I was like, what? What what now we don't want to have a computer in the building. So what did they do? They built a data center a few miles away from the studio, and they basically ran dark fiber, you know, all the private pipe from that data center to the facility.

00:10:00:17 - 00:10:15:19
Robbie
Probably not something any of us are going to do, but just bear with me for a second. Right. And so they had this data center over here. They had the studio over here. Every room that you walked into, just literally had a keyboard, a mouse, and a couple of monitors. But there was no computers, right? So here's the beauty of it.

00:10:15:21 - 00:10:36:07
Robbie
You know, let's just say you're an After Effects person and you're working on some complicated show open and you're like, oh man. Well, I've been working, you know, in proxy mode or draft mode, and this is great. But now I need to get a full, you know, full view of this. Well, the user could call up the help desk at the data center and go, hey, I need three GPUs for this render.

00:10:36:07 - 00:11:11:10
Robbie
Can you make it happen? Click do do do do do a couple minutes later. Guess what that system magically has. It now has three GPUs assigned to it. And at that time I was like, what is going on? This is this is amazing that you have this scalable architecture that can go. No, in terms of actual hardware that we think about paying for and installing on a machine, be flexible enough to go where an individual user has a specific need, temporary need, let's say a Ram at it, lesser disk at it, let's throw GPU at it.

00:11:11:10 - 00:11:26:04
Robbie
Right. And that was 1012 years ago when this was happening. And back then it was tens of millions of dollars to, support this kind of infrastructure. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting anybody dig dark fiber, you know, private pipe fiber from point to point.

00:11:26:06 - 00:11:53:22
Joey
Well, so here is where things have changed, right? To be able to do really competent remote desktop interaction, you do need a lot of bandwidth. Ten years ago, that meant dedicated fiber, which made it absurdly expensive for most end users. Now a gigabit internet connection is 100 bucks a month in most of the world, right? Yeah. So accessing those VMs is now become possible on a workstation level.

00:11:54:00 - 00:12:23:13
Robbie
Yeah. So that was my first exposure to it and so over, you know, since then I have dabbled just like many people have probably dabbled with local hypervisors. And what I mean by a local hypervisor is a piece of software that runs locally on your local computer to allow you to virtualize other OS's. So for me, I prefer the Mac as my main, you know, duty workstation, but I have often have needs to jump over to Linux to do like Dhcp stuff.

00:12:23:13 - 00:12:51:16
Robbie
Or I have, you know, need to go over to windows because there's a specific piece of software that's windows only. So I've dabbled in local virtualization using, you know, tools like probably a lot of people are already familiar with parallels, VMware. I mean, there's a few of them, you know, out there, that do this kind of thing, thing where you, you know, basically install this hypervisor, you install the OS that you, you want to work on, has to, by the way, that OS has to support the local capabilities of your computer.

00:12:51:16 - 00:13:08:21
Robbie
But that's a side side topic. And I've installed windows, Linux, etc. and I just launch that when I need to get those, those applications or those tools. But I'm still running it from my local desktop and going into it. And I think a lot of people probably have that experience. That's a cool first way to attack this, right?

00:13:08:23 - 00:13:33:02
Robbie
But it's not exactly the level of virtualization that where I really want to dive in today. So, the level of virtualization that I want to talk about today is building a virtualization machine that can handle all of that. So instead of running it locally on whatever workstation you're on, we're essentially building a server that has all of the capabilities that we'd want.

00:13:33:02 - 00:14:09:03
Robbie
And what I mean by all of the capability is, well, it's an interesting question. I want you to think just briefly about, your dream scenario. Like, if you could have a machine that has whatever, four GPUs, a terabyte of memory, etc., that's the top of the pyramid for you building your virtual machine, right? You want to pop in as much stuff as you could possibly want, but the beauty about building a virtualized server on itself is that we yes, we can dedicate that to one machine, but the real beauty is that we can take all of that hardware and all of that super ness about this machine and distribute it, and divide it up

00:14:09:03 - 00:14:14:10
Robbie
and break it up however we want to, whatever the needs are. Right?

00:14:14:12 - 00:14:38:07
Joey
Yes. And, you know, there's a couple levels to even that. You know, we're going to talk about both building your own VM host, as in you buy the server, you configure it, you are hosting your own virtual machines or having a cloud provider do it for you where you're just buying cloud resources. You can build a workstation.

00:14:38:07 - 00:15:13:15
Joey
In either scenario, what's relatively new to the virtualization game is being able to virtualize GPU, and this kind of happens in two different ways, right? The simplest way is if you do have a VM host, you can have multiple GPUs, physical GPUs in it, and you can do what's called a PCI pass through. You can literally say this virtual machine, say Resolve Workstation A gets the GTX 5090 right now when you do that, no other virtual machine can get that 5090.

00:15:13:17 - 00:15:42:16
Joey
So you can have multiple GPUs and share them on multiple VMs. But the really cool thing that can happen now, and you're probably not going to get into this if you build your own VM host. But when we get into I'm going to build a virtual resolve workstation in the cloud. You do have this option, which is just like you can take a 24 core CPU and split out its cores to give them to different VMs, so you can split out your system memory on the host to different VMs.

00:15:42:20 - 00:16:17:03
Joey
With the more advanced server boards that Nvidia sells, you can split up the GPU cores per VM. So let's look at the biggest possible virtualized workstation environment for like a major corporation, right. They have either doing this in the cloud or the private data center doesn't really matter. But their VM hosts have a buttload of CPU buttload of memory and a buttload of the Nvidia Tesla cards that are virtualized.

00:16:17:05 - 00:16:43:04
Joey
Right? So then you say, okay, I need eight resolves today. Each one of those resolves gets how many GPU cores, how many CPU cores, how much memory those individual cards can be split out to multiple images and multiple VMs. So there's two different ways to do a workstation level GPU with virtualization. There is one giving a whole GPU to the VM.

00:16:43:04 - 00:16:58:11
Joey
That's the easy way that if you're building this yourself, you're probably going to do the harder way. But if you're building something for a facility is to get virtualized GPUs that you can then assign to VMs on a demand basis.

00:16:58:13 - 00:17:27:19
Robbie
Yeah. So it can get, as you said, very complicated. I want to again unpack that a little bit, because I think there's a few interesting things that you have pointed out there. Right. And some, some phrases, some, some concepts that I think are really, really important. Right. So the first one that I think about in this, I don't know, this, this setup or this sort of building of these, this kind of setups is I think about the phrase bare metal, right, as a, as a sort of a baseline concept.

00:17:27:19 - 00:17:39:13
Robbie
And I think that people may have heard that concept before. But to you, what what is what is bare metal mean? Because I think it's an important I think it's an important term. Before we move on to the virtualization parts.

00:17:39:17 - 00:18:11:17
Joey
Yeah, bare metal is the actual hardware. So when you talk about what's called a bare metal hypervisor, like let's say you install windows on a computer, right? Windows with the operating system running on your bare metal. If you install something like VMware ESXi or Proxmox or any of what they're considered bare metal hypervisors, that hypervisor system now replaces, what the operating system on that hardware would be, and you only really access it like you don't plug a keyboard and mouse into that.

00:18:11:17 - 00:18:35:15
Joey
You access that over a web based console, and you kind of manage your virtual machines from there. That is how VM hosts are done most of the time. You know, desktop virtualization, like Rob said, is great if you have a laptop that you want to open up a windows app on real quick, but it's a mac. Yeah, VirtualBox, parallels, VMware or whatever works great for that, but you're not going to run a resolve workstation that way.

00:18:35:17 - 00:18:44:06
Joey
Bare metal hypervisors replace all operating system on a physical, physical computer and allow you to run VMs from that.

00:18:44:06 - 00:19:06:20
Robbie
Yeah. So I think about it as so, you know, the bare metal part about it is the hardware. You're right. But this, this hypervisor, this this additional layer sits one level above what most people, I think is, you know, think about their traditional OS, right. Conceptually, it kind of sits at this level that is between the hardware and what most of us think about as a traditional OS.

00:19:06:22 - 00:19:32:17
Robbie
And that's the part that's the key component. That hypervisor is what allows us to then install a bunch of other OS, run virtual machines on that. It's the traffic cop. It's the manager of the hardware to figure out. Okay, well, you need this much Ram. You need this much CPU, you need this much CPU. It is the traffic cop that lets us handle and sort of track and manage all those all these virtual machines.

00:19:32:19 - 00:19:49:10
Robbie
Okay, so I think you make it you make an interesting point. So we have this bare metal stuff. That's the hardware that we need to do. We have this hypervisor and you named a few of them VMware, Proxmox etc.. Now the next level down from that. So now that we got the bare metal, we got the hypervisor that's going to control that bare metal.

00:19:49:12 - 00:20:14:08
Robbie
The next step down is what you already referred to as virtual machines or these individual setups. Now I want to ask sort of clarify and ask questions at the same time. So when I get to that level, I'm ready to start installing some VMs. Does that literally mean that I am basically making, choices about what hardware I want to pull into that virtual machine?

00:20:14:08 - 00:20:27:13
Robbie
Or does the virtual machine sort of do that for me? Does the virtual machine go, hey, I'm Windows, I need at least 32 gig. Like, is there a lot of automation to this, or is it all about the user setting it up, for and configuring it?

00:20:27:15 - 00:20:58:12
Joey
It's both. If you're doing this manually, you can basically assign whatever resources you want and then manually install whatever operating system you want. When this scales up to a production workflow, what you end up having is you have a set of pre-installed images. So for example, you would have like you would install a windows workstation, install resolve on it, install after effects on, install whatever the system needs for the users, right?

00:20:58:14 - 00:21:21:10
Joey
Then that image gets stored on your storage and then when a user requests a workstation, what will actually happen is a new virtual machine will be built for them automatically by a script. It will say, hey, copy this image to be the hard drive of this virtual machine. Send it to the user, and then boom, Bob's your uncle.

00:21:21:10 - 00:21:45:07
Joey
They have literally a brand new computer that didn't exist until this morning. They can do their work on it because all of our media is stored on a network storage somewhere, right? So they don't need any local storage. Then when they shut that machine down, it actually deletes the virtual machine altogether. It d provisions it. So all of the actual workstations are temporary.

00:21:45:08 - 00:22:08:06
Joey
Now why would you want that? Because guess what. You can have two versions of your workstation image. You can have the current working one. Then you can have the oh I'm trying resolve 20 I'm trying resolve 21. I'm testing. Right. You test with that. And then when it's ready, you just say, hey, guess what? The new default image for users logging in this morning is now the new one.

00:22:08:06 - 00:22:26:12
Joey
We've just upgraded everyone's workstation in one day, but also fully tested it across our whole workflow without any risk. That's one of the really cool things about virtualizing all of your workstations, is that you can test all you want, and then only deploy when you're ready.

00:22:26:13 - 00:22:53:04
Robbie
Yeah, so I think it's interesting because I think that for me, being a little bit newer to this concept than you are, I was expecting some handholding when I first set this up. And I think, I think for the average user, the average user setting up a virtualized thing, it's going to be pretty much fully manual unless you're at that mega huge, you know, data center level, you're going to have to make some decisions about what kind of hardware configurations, like I said.

00:22:53:04 - 00:23:21:08
Robbie
Also, it's worth noting at this point, too, that while many of the hypervisors are free or low cost, the to get a lot, a lot of times some of the advanced features out of them, like the GPU core splitting, that kind of stuff, you're most likely going to need a paid version of the hypervisor. And two, just because a hypervisor can support and, you know, make a virtual machine out of, whatever OS doesn't mean that it's just free and legal to do so.

00:23:21:08 - 00:23:26:06
Robbie
Right? Like you might still have to adhere to the Eula of those various OS's.

00:23:26:06 - 00:23:28:07
Joey
You still need to buy a windows license, for example.

00:23:28:08 - 00:23:49:07
Robbie
You still need to buy a windows license or check the boxes for whatever Linux distro you're using. Mac OS famously has fought virtualization for years. I'm not going to say this definitively. There may or may not be. I can neither confirm nor deny that there are some people out there who have tried to get this working. Go at your own, on your own on that one.

00:23:49:09 - 00:23:52:22
Joey
There's no legal way to virtualize a mac OS desktop, right?

00:23:52:22 - 00:24:19:20
Robbie
That's that's the that's the quick way of saying it. So I, you know, I had that, I had that, you know, sort of manual experience. But what got me at first, joy when I started setting this up on a, on a, you know, first locally and then eventually dedicated machine, was I did not understand the concept in the role that the, the hypervisor played and when I'm just going to label as passing through air quotes here devices the bare metal pieces.

00:24:19:20 - 00:24:55:16
Robbie
So I would load up a windows thing and go, well, what the hell, I have this beefy GPU in the system and it's still saying it's running off the, you know, Intel built in, you know, you know, CPU based chip. Why is that? Well, because I was ignoring this whole idea of device passthrough. And you you mentioned this before, but very specifically, most hypervisors are going to have categories for the things that you need to use on that bare metal network storage, GPU memory, USB you're going to have to choose what gets passed through from the bare metal to that machine.

00:24:55:16 - 00:25:20:07
Robbie
And it's really important to note is this not all devices and pieces of hardware can be virtualized, right? There. You know, I've run into this problem with some audio, audio, interfaces and that kind of stuff where they freak out that they're not running on the bare metal and that they're virtualized. So there is some experimentation to that, that's at play about what you're going to pass through and how that works.

00:25:20:09 - 00:25:49:02
Joey
So and that's actually another big advantage to multi-user setups, though, because you can, for example, dynamically assign USB devices. What does that mean? It means dongles. If you have, for example, ten ProTools workstations that are all virtualized now, and only one person needs this really expensive plugins suite, you can say you get the dongle today, and then if you move them to another machine, they can get the dongle today and you can take a USB dongle.

00:25:49:02 - 00:26:14:06
Joey
There's actually software out there too that will help manage this from a like large facility perspective. But the idea to think about is you could share one dongle. It's still one dongle per user, but if you have ten users and five dongles, but only 2 or 3 users need a dongle at a given time, you just save yourself 50% on software cost for a ten user installation.

00:26:14:08 - 00:26:16:13
Joey
You know, that's that's not inconsequential.

00:26:16:13 - 00:26:44:15
Robbie
Yeah. And but it's just it's just interesting. And we won't get into the thick of this today, but it can get a little squirrely. And you know, hard to get your mind around sometimes, the networking side of this and some of the devices. But conceptually it's about taking whatever the actual piece of hardware, seeing that bare metal and choosing what is going to get sent through to that particular virtual machine and, and what components of that are going to get sent there.

00:26:44:16 - 00:27:11:14
Joey
So we've talked a lot about kind of all the technical details and the how and the why, but what I think that we haven't touched on and what I really want to get into is what does this look like for most of our listeners, I think, and for us individually. So the reason why we're doing this and the reason why I say we're doing this, Robbie and I are experimenting with this in great ways.

00:27:11:16 - 00:27:38:10
Joey
But I want to give you two hypothetical use cases, a locally hosted use case and a cloud hosted use case, both for Robbie and I's actual color business. So let's just lay it out. What do we have right now? We have three locations. We have my house. We have Robbie's house, and we have an office where we have clients come in for reviews or look, setting sessions or anything that we want to be in person.

00:27:38:10 - 00:28:05:12
Joey
So clients don't necessarily have to come to our house. That means three workstations. That means three reference monitors. That means three control surfaces. That means syncing all of our project data to three locations. And in general, this has worked very, very well, especially with the Resolve Cloud database being able to Robbie can start a project. I can pick up a project and we can go to the office and review the project with the client.

00:28:05:12 - 00:28:37:01
Joey
This is wonderful, but there's a lot to manage with syncing data and having three different things at three different locations and having, okay, do we have this plugin installed on all three? If I go to the office to do a review, have I synced all the details? Using little details like that get to be a hassle. So what we've kind of conceptualized and started experimenting with is both having this completely hosted in the cloud.

00:28:37:03 - 00:28:57:12
Joey
So we pay a monthly fee for all of our storage and all of our workstations, and we don't do anything. All we have at each three locations is a basic computer with a DaVinci control surface, like a mini panel and a reference monitor, and that basic computer has a deck link, so we can use Da Vinci remote monitoring for our playback.

00:28:57:16 - 00:29:09:16
Joey
So we have a virtual workstation somewhere in the cloud that is sending DaVinci remote monitor to my house one day, Robbie's house one day, or the office one day.

00:29:09:22 - 00:29:29:04
Robbie
I won't stop you for one second, cuz I think this is something that's hard to get your mind around. So you said, hey, I have this basic computer that I'm, you know, interfacing with on this, this, this, this virtual machine somewhere in the cloud. I think this is a core component that we shouldn't gloss over. When you are working with a virtual machine and a dedicated server not running like a VM locally.

00:29:29:04 - 00:30:04:21
Robbie
But like I said, we described, you're connecting to that machine basically through a remote desktop connection. Right? And there's plenty of tools to do this. Some of them are more preferential for this kind of work than others, but it's essentially a remote desktop connection. And likewise, just like you're passing data or, passing, bare metal hardware components to the virtual machine in this remote desktop solution, you're also sending things like USB controller, etc. from the remote system to the virtual system via this remote desktop app or some other protocol.

00:30:04:23 - 00:30:25:03
Joey
Yeah. So some of the things like we were talking about earlier, like this has been it was really easy to get this going with servers. It was a lot harder to get this going with workstations because you didn't have gigabit connections for Remote Desktop. And you'll notice resolve only recently really started embracing remote panels and remote reference monitors.

00:30:25:03 - 00:30:41:10
Joey
That's directly because people wanted to remote out their workstation. So now we kind of have this capability where the entire resolve system could be somewhere else, and then the local office can have a basic desktop with a deck link and a mini panel, and it's good to go.

00:30:41:11 - 00:31:02:16
Robbie
And so one other thing about this. So if we were using Remote Desktop to connect to and control that virtual machine and you you mentioned this, but I want to just be clear about this. Unlike the traditional setup where that deck link is, you know, is getting information or the signal directly from your local computer. This is a little bit of a mind job, but you actually become like the client, your clients.

00:31:02:16 - 00:31:27:13
Robbie
On this end, you are streaming from the virtual machine to your local setup and then pumping that out to a monitor. So you are essentially streaming the video signal rather than having it directly, you know, in a SDI cable from the computer, right, to your monitor from, you know, from the main workstation, your, your remote, your basic setup becomes sort of the, the interface for that remote stream.

00:31:27:15 - 00:32:02:14
Joey
Exactly. So let's go back to this hypothetical Robbie and I situation. If we were to do this, why? Well, think about it this way. We've got three offices and only ever have two people using them. At any given point, we would only need to build a virtual environment for two resolve systems with enough juice for two systems. That way, Robbie and I could always be working and we could be at our house, or we could be at the office, or we could be on a beach remote desktop in from an iPad to do basic stuff like conforme or editorial things.

00:32:02:16 - 00:32:26:12
Joey
And as long as we have the resources to always have two machines running, we can run three locations. We could run another review location somewhere else if we needed to, if I needed to go on vacation, or like if I was going to be gone for a while, we could I could bring a monitor with me and then have the full experience and the full real time playback as if I was on my main workstation.

00:32:26:14 - 00:32:53:17
Joey
So the idea of being able to completely remove the location from where you're computing is really, really powerful to us, especially since we bounce between locations so often and we have the needs to do client reviews, etc. now. Right now we're kind of considering building that as a locally hosted solution. Big server either probably at my house or Robbie's house, because we have really fast internet.

00:32:53:19 - 00:33:15:11
Joey
And then that serves out the resolve workstations to all three locations. The other option is to go on to AWS to go on to linode, to go on to any of the cloud service providers, and build up a resolve image that does everything we need. Buy enough storage, cloud storage. It's high speed to connect to those resolve images.

00:33:15:13 - 00:33:44:21
Joey
And then Robbie and I both just connect to our resolve image in the cloud. All of our media is now only in one place, so we never need to sync anything. And we could be at the office. We can be at my home. We can be at Robbie's home. Sweet does not matter one bit. And the advantage of doing it in the cloud scenario, although the cost right now is a lot, a lot more expensive than hosting it locally, that one that cost is going down, but also okay.

00:33:44:22 - 00:34:05:18
Joey
I just finished a six episode series that was maybe 30TB of data. Once we're done with that and we archive maybe all that to tape or like cold storage in the cloud, we delete that from our cloud image that we're storing. We're not paying for that anymore. You're only paying for the storage you use at a given time.

00:34:05:18 - 00:34:12:10
Joey
So we can scale up and down based on project need. That's kind of one of the arguments for the cloud environment.

00:34:12:10 - 00:34:31:20
Robbie
So so there's a few things to unpack there as well. So I so you're right to point out that there's ways to do essentially a self-hosted virtualization. Right. Put a machine in a rack somewhere, put it on the internet, you know, that's that's that. And then then there's sort of the cloud side to something, you know, I always love this show creates, you know, the cloud is just somebody else's computer.

00:34:31:22 - 00:34:50:13
Robbie
Which, which is just, you know, in a data center somewhere. So the advantages, I think I see both sides of it. I think you and I are prone to a little bit to the first one simply because of a control issue, like liking to have. Here's the hardware. Something goes breaking on it. I'm not waiting for somebody.

00:34:50:15 - 00:35:09:07
Robbie
You know, that kind of thing. Whereas the cloud thing, it's like, hey, well, if something goes down or the machine needs to be restarted, like there's some there's some logistical things there. The big logistical thing that I have with an all cloud VM workflow is the media, right, is that, you know, you're having there's no way to get around.

00:35:09:09 - 00:35:28:02
Robbie
Hey, I need to get this media to the virtual machine. Right. So that's either going to be an upload, which potentially could be very, you know, heavy depending on how much you're putting up there. The other advantage I think you, you rightly pointed out, Julie, about the cloud way of doing this is that it is a little bit more scalable, right?

00:35:28:02 - 00:35:42:22
Robbie
Because even though you're working on a virtualized machine, that data center is virtualized, right? So them, them having to say, oh, well, you need another 32TB of storage, no problem. Even though, you know, they they're doing that on their own.

00:35:42:22 - 00:36:10:08
Joey
Yeah. If we build it ourselves, we need to buy the hardware for the biggest thing that we'll ever need initially. Whereas, you know, a lot of colorists work in partnerships where they might have five colorists in their kind of group that are all over the country, and they all kind of represent themselves and book each other together. That kind of kind of collective arrangement is the perfect use case for a cloud scenario, because you only pay for what storage you need.

00:36:10:13 - 00:36:20:12
Joey
If three of the five aren't working on collective projects at one given time, you only need to pay for two workstations. You want another workstation, you add another workstation, and.

00:36:20:12 - 00:36:42:07
Robbie
You can scale as appropriate depending on the capabilities of the space. So. So the other thing, the other advantage I see of the cloud though, is that also it's a it's a relatively minimal setup. Like you can actually go on the AWS marketplace and purchase pre-configured machine setups, like if you want to buy resolve in, you know, AWS instance of, resolve machine, just a couple pull downs.

00:36:42:07 - 00:37:04:03
Robbie
I need this many GPUs. I need this much memory, I need this much storage. Bam! Buy it and you're done. I have the arithmetic of this. It has currently in 2025. It has proven to be that workflow has been more expensive than the bottom line lumber that I would have for buying the equipment and either, depreciating or leasing that equipment.

00:37:04:03 - 00:37:22:22
Robbie
Right. So like if we're using the machines, you know, between the two of us, say, 70 hours a week, right? It's going to be a couple grand a month, to make that happen in the cloud. So that got us to thinking about. Okay, we're not quite yet ready for full cloud implementation, though. We see that benefit. How can we do this locally?

00:37:22:22 - 00:37:41:11
Robbie
And so we started looking into this. And I think one thing that we skipped over earlier, which is worth mentioning, but you just sort of said about we'd have to kind of envision the biggest, baddest scenario that we want. I want to be clear about something, the cost of a machine to do this air quotes the right way is very high.

00:37:41:12 - 00:38:06:22
Robbie
It is not this is not a a cheap investment. This is not like going to buy, you know, a mac mini from the Apple Store and plugging it in. We're talking server grade hardware, server grade thought components about cooling power. You know, the whole nine yards. So if this feels like, oh that's cool. But this is a lot to chew off, then probably the cloud way of things is probably more of your, you know, your your workflow.

00:38:07:04 - 00:38:25:11
Robbie
For us it was like, yeah, we want the local control. We want the scalability of this. We want the power to just to plug in, etc.. So briefly, I want to just talk about the core things that I've been thinking about in that setup. So number one is obviously, thinking about the, the CPU architecture and the CPU power.

00:38:25:13 - 00:38:47:07
Robbie
I'm thinking server level CPUs for this. I am not thinking, you know, core processors. I'm not even I'm probably not even thinking at this point, not even Zions, because they have some issues. I'm thinking things like epic and some of those really big monster AMD epic kind of setups. Well, I'm talking 96 cores, 124 cores, you know, those kind of setups, right?

00:38:47:07 - 00:39:06:07
Robbie
So we can have a full on workstation, those processors really expensive like ten, 12 grand each. Next. I'm thinking about Ram. Obviously the more Ram, the more memory, the better. You know, I the box that we've been kind of speaking out has about 512 gigs as a as, sort of a baseline. We could add more to that, to be honest with.

00:39:06:08 - 00:39:31:00
Robbie
You can run various more, you know, machines on it. You know, a terabyte is not out of the question for, amount of memory for a big box like this. Next, I'm thinking about GPU. Honestly, this is the harder part of this equation because as Joey pointed out before, a lot of the consumer level GPUs are not really virtual, sizable in the sense of virtual.

00:39:31:00 - 00:39:59:02
Robbie
I made up that word are not really virtual, visible in the sense of being able to shave out specific functionality. You can use the whole GPU, but if you want ten cores from this GPU one day and 20 cores the next day or whatever, you're going to have to go to the data center server level, you know, at, Blackwell, etc. those, you know, what we traditionally thought of, like as Quadro card kind of level, you know, data center GPUs, also not inexpensive.

00:39:59:03 - 00:40:32:12
Robbie
These GPUs can be, you know, 4 or 5 grand a pop. You're going to need a couple of them, right. And then lastly, it's the storage and the the networking. Fortunately, we've already thought about that. We already have most of the storage need in play. We have big masses with you know, terabytes and terabytes and terabytes. So just to be clear, the estimate that I have for doing this kind of build out is right around 50 to 60 grand as a baseline, and we could probably get it up to about 80, 90 grand if we really wanted to get after it, if we really wanted to get after it.

00:40:32:12 - 00:40:55:12
Robbie
Right. So this is not something that we're taking lightly and it's a huge cost, investment, etc.. So what we're doing in the meantime before we dive about is we are testing this. I have a, a Threadripper, 32 core, a 39 to a 39, 39, 70 x Threadripper that I'm not using anymore. It's on a workstation motherboard.

00:40:55:17 - 00:41:19:12
Robbie
We're going to pop this into a machine with storage, the whole nine yards and see what it's like. We know that it's going to have some limitations, but we're using already owned hardware to test this kind of thing out. And if it works, great, if it runs into problems, we know where those problems are. But then the next step after that would be obviously to scale up to something that is more, more scalable as well as just more robust in general.

00:41:19:15 - 00:41:40:02
Joey
Yeah. And I know it sounds like a gigantic amount of money, but if you look at, okay, my workstation at my home office was 14,000, $15,000. My storage was probably close to $10,000. So that's half the cost right there on one site, we're talking about replacing three sites with one box.

00:41:40:07 - 00:41:59:09
Robbie
And that's why when we started off this conversation and I said, I always think about this every time I have to renew those lease agreements and buy 4 or 5 machines. That's why I'm thinking about it, because every time I'm like, well, gosh. And to be clear, you know, before anybody gets any ideas that we're just rolling in, you know, 90 grand of extra cash lying around, this would probably be a lease situation to kind of to kind of handle.

00:41:59:09 - 00:42:21:16
Robbie
Right. Like I'm not going to sink because also it's one of those things where, you know, very, very quickly a year or two this thing is going to start to go downhill. I don't want to necessarily sink all that cash into something that is going to, deprecate pretty, pretty, you know, pretty quickly. And so to manage those costs, it would probably be, yes, we're going to lease or finance this somehow.

00:42:21:18 - 00:42:45:14
Joey
But that's also another advantage doing it. This way is once we build out the virtual workstation images as we want them, if we five years down the road like great, we need a much beefier box. And we've brought on other colorists and we're much bigger now. We those images are just files. We can migrate those to a new host without redoing any of the configuration work, right?

00:42:45:14 - 00:43:17:00
Joey
We just throw new hardware at it. Or if we want to take this to the cloud later, we can take those images and upload them to the cloud and basically be working the exact same way. We're taking our entire, you know, three location workstation, set up all the configuration, all of the hassle, and putting it in essentially one file on a server somewhere that becomes very, very portable, which is one of the reasons why this is really attractive to me.

00:43:17:02 - 00:43:40:02
Robbie
Yeah, and I agree. So we're going to try on that, that Threadripper system. But even if you don't have that you know, I mean it's a pretty robust system by itself. I would encourage those of you who are interested in this, there's a lot of very, very cheap ways, to, to to get into this. Of course, you can start out with the local VM, pieces of software, those visualizers and try running Windows or Linux or whatever on your local machine.

00:43:40:04 - 00:43:56:17
Robbie
But if you want to get away from that and run it on a dedicated server, sure. Start out with a mac mini or an Intel NUC or, you know, one of those, you know, a thin client that you know, HP makes or whatever, get download download Fusion or Proxmox or something like that. You can get into this fairly easily.

00:43:56:19 - 00:44:20:00
Robbie
And to be fair, I actually got into this not for work reasons, not for, workstation reasons. I got this into this because I got into Joe, got me into a couple of years ago into home assistant. Right. And then next thing I know, I was into Octoprint, and the next thing I know, I was, you know, into whatever and all of these things, like, really, really didn't warrant a computer by themselves.

00:44:20:00 - 00:44:38:00
Robbie
Right? Like I wasn't going to be like, oh, I'm going to buy a dedicated server just to run my home assistant on and spend three grand on it. Right. But I got into it because I'm like, cool. Well, I can get this one relatively small box. I bought it off eBay, like I bought like a, you know, it's like a i7 or something like that.

00:44:38:00 - 00:44:48:19
Robbie
I got 64 gigs of Ram in it, and guess what? It runs like six virtual machines for me just fine. And I know you have like you have a higher end one, like a one you super micro but same idea. Yeah.

00:44:48:19 - 00:45:11:01
Joey
So I run, you know, I'm already doing this on the server side for everything we need for our business. Right. We have not just my little personal stuff like the home assistant, some of the other stuff, but all of the stuff that runs are all project management are remote. Workflow optimizations are synchronizing software that we use. That's all running on a little one.

00:45:11:01 - 00:45:36:04
Joey
Use Supermicro box sitting in my rack and it's running. I think 12 virtual servers right now. So the server side do right now. It's cheap. It's easy. Your resolve project server can be on that. It's super nice to be able to say, oh, there's this really cool open source like media transcoder that I want to try out. Let me just make a computer for it by clicking one button, right.

00:45:36:04 - 00:45:46:15
Joey
You can try different workflows with it in different servers and things like that. It's just what's new, I think. And what's cutting edge is trying to move your entire workstation environment.

00:45:46:18 - 00:46:05:21
Robbie
And so I think, you know, to kind of to narrow in on this, I think that at the very high end, you know, this if, you know, if you're a, engineer at company three or whatever, like, this is like, yeah, cool. Guys. We've been we've been talking about this for a decade, right? Like at the high end, these kind of workflows are in place.

00:46:06:03 - 00:46:24:13
Robbie
You know, I mentioned Major League Baseball earlier. NFL films does something similar, like, there are like the big, big entities have been doing this for years for all of the reasons, the cost saving reasons, efficiency reasons, etc.. What is new, as you pointed out to to, is this trickling down to regular old Joes like us? And I think it's something to think about.

00:46:24:13 - 00:46:40:11
Robbie
And I think, you know, the the math that I do in my head is I way. Okay, let's look at the 1 to 1 cost. I have this for buying five machines. I have this for buying one machine. Then I look at it as like, okay, well the pros are the local. I have this, you know, these are machines that I control and operate.

00:46:40:13 - 00:47:03:05
Robbie
Maybe I control operate, maybe I don't over here like you got to build your own pros and cons list. For this, we right now to be completely transparent, our pros and cons list is kind of about equal, right? So that's why. That's why we are, like, a little hesitant to drop, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on this right now and biting off like, oh, you know what?

00:47:03:05 - 00:47:20:21
Robbie
I got this Threadripper box set. We can try this on. Let's see how it goes, you know, and see and see where the pitfalls are. And I honestly, I think there's probably a lot of pitfalls that we're not envisioning quite yet that are only going to come through where, like, I'm sure we're going to have a situation where like, oh, you know what?

00:47:20:21 - 00:47:45:17
Robbie
Well, that's that keyboard maestro, macro that you have doesn't pass through in the right way to this VM. Like there's going to be small things like that. Right? But I think from a hardware point of view, the dream that I have is okay, eventually, I'm saying maybe five years from now, we have a box that is built to our spec, and we designed it how we want.

00:47:45:19 - 00:48:02:19
Robbie
We're going to do a have relationship in a data center, put our own box into that data set that exists. By the way, you can you yes, you can buy other people's server, but you can also bring your own stuff in dual collab. And then guess what? I'm going to live anywhere that I want with any housing, you know, situation that I want.

00:48:03:01 - 00:48:07:19
Robbie
And I'm still accessing a world class workstation every day to go to work. Can't beat that.

00:48:07:19 - 00:48:29:22
Joey
You know, the hardware is getting cheaper and the virtualization in the cloud is getting cheaper. So we are like like don't make no no mistake about it. The the cost comparison right now, like Rob said, is probably equal, maybe even more expensive to do it this way. Definitely more expensive to do it in the cloud. But that is moving forward and getting better and better every day.

00:48:29:22 - 00:48:50:07
Joey
I do really think this is the future for how creative work is going to be done, and that's why we wanted to talk about it, because you might not be doing this tomorrow, but the idea of I can virtualize everything and now where the computer is doesn't matter is incredibly powerful for artists and small businesses.

00:48:50:07 - 00:49:14:07
Robbie
Yeah. And the small business part, I think, you know, we didn't really hit on this, but there's a lot of, things around the edges of this discussion that are worth weighing, you know, for a large company. I mean, like, honestly say, the obvious electricity is a huge, like, pain, you know, like, would you rather have a machine room full of, you know, 30 computers versus, you know, whatever, 1 or 2 virtual about, you know, what I'm saying?

00:49:14:07 - 00:49:31:11
Robbie
Like, there's there's a lot of things that add up into that, and there's going to be specific to your business and to your workflow, your work model. But it is definitely something to consider. And I think that, Joey, I think if we have this conversation again in five years, I think it's almost assured that we're probably going to be in this workflow.

00:49:31:11 - 00:49:59:01
Robbie
And I think that a lot of other companies our size are going to consider this workflow. As the internet gets better, the remote desktops get better, the parsers get better. I think we're going to be there. So what's a lot to chew? A lot to bite off in this one. But hopefully you have kind of the, you know, 50,000ft view of what a virtualization workflow is and can be, can go everywhere from a local hypervisor running on your local machine all the way up to a full blown data center approach, and all the steps in between.

00:49:59:01 - 00:50:18:11
Robbie
It's definitely something to consider. So, as a reminder, you can always head up to the offset podcast.com and find show notes and, check out our library of episodes. Of course, the show is available on all major, streaming platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc. if you have any questions, feel free to head over to the offset podcast.

00:50:18:11 - 00:50:32:02
Robbie
Drop us a line there. There's a little form you can submit, show ideas or some questions. And of course, if you do like the show and feel like supporting us, you can buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Oh. Any, any support. It really does mean a lot and goes a long way for real coffee.

00:50:32:02 - 00:50:48:07
Robbie
In Joey’s case. Any support you might be able to offer, really helps us out. Keep producing these episodes every. Every two weeks, pretty much year round. So, we appreciate any support that you can give. And thanks, as always, to our sponsor, Flanders Scientific. Couldn't do the show without you. And to our great editor Stella.

00:50:48:08 - 00:51:04:21
Robbie
Right, Joey. Good. Good chat. I think our next episode, we'll probably turn it from your wheelhouse, maybe back a little bit to my wheelhouse. I have to think about some subjects on that and that degree. But to our listeners, thanks for checking out the episode and for the ole’ Offset Podcast. I'm Robbie Carman.

00:51:04:23 - 00:51:13:08
Joey
And I'm Joey D’Anna. Thanks for listening.