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I'm considering renting a dedicated AX server at hetzner.de. Those are built with Ryzen 1700X (more powerful ones with threadripper) which has no graphics whatsoever.

That server would be running VirtualBox guests. I need some guests to be Windows & Ubuntu desktops. I was planning to simply enable VirtualBox's RDP display servers for them.

I have no way of testing this scenario as I currently have no computers available completely without graphics.

Hetzner's tech support says that this should not be an issue and I should go ahead without worries, but unfortunately I'm old enough to remember what happened when I first replaced my trusted Tseng ET4000 with an actual 2D accelerator (my machine took off like a rocket :) ).

Will this setup even work? I mean, without graphics acceleration, I'm guessing the best I can get is high CPU usage running unaccelerated graphics, right?

Edit (after jumping into it): well, I'm running Windows & Ubuntu guests in there without issues. No significant additional CPU usage even though graphics card in there is purely a 2D accelerator (SM 750). Additionally it's running a dozen or so servers (ubuntu based), leaving me plenty of CPU & RAM resources to play with. I'm happy :)

velis
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    The vbox manual has a whole chapter on [remote headless management](https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html). Yes, it can run graphical systems on effectively graphics-less hardware. 2d will probably be fine, though anything 3d will be sub par at best. – Andrew Domaszek Feb 05 '18 at 22:45
  • Whether the host has an accelerated video adapter or not doesn't matter - it's not virtualized anyway (short of some specialized GPUs that do support virtualization which you'd need for 3D). The 2D graphics load is negligible to today's systems which are more than 1000x faster then early 1990s hardware. – Zac67 May 22 '18 at 18:57

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