stottle

Can someone point me at instructions for formatting an unassigned disk and mounting it so I can put the VM on it?

Excellent, thanks for the pointers. I'll read up more on libvirt and check out your links. I'm running J River Media Center. Works well with media on unRAID, keeps multiple machines synchronized, and can stream (I use their Andoid app called Gizmo). I've been happy with it.

I've got an old unRAID setup (*upgraded* to 4.7, not messed with since) and 2nd machine running windows to convert audio/video for streaming (as well as watching on TV). The virtualization goals of 6 seem to align with my desire to consolidate the two machines into one server. I've got 6.0-beta7 installed on a new machine with 4TB drives to start pulling content from the old server, and I'd like to start figuring out how to run a windows VM on it. So I'm trying to learn, but it is hard to keep up, given it is a moving target. With Beta 7, KVM looks to be the recommended approach. I guess my high level questions are: 1) I'm thinking I should install a new drive, not parity checked by unRAID, to host my VM. I can manage backups myself, and I don't want to take the hit on my disk I/O performance. Is this the recommended approach? If so, what is the recommended filesystem? 2) I've used hyper-v, virtualbox, and vmware. Those have provided a UI for creating a new VM, so creating a VM in a text editor is new. I found this link that looks like a good starting point. It talks about libvirt as a proxy for various hypervisors. Is libvirt the right API to use for unRAID? 3) I'm ok with starting without passthru, but that will be needed down the road. According to this blog, Intel's GPU in the i5 won't do passthru. I'd need to add a discrete GPU to the server to do passthru then, right? Or has someone found a fix for that which I've missed? TIA for any pointers, and if you have other getting started links (anything specific to the direction unRAID is going especially) would be appreciated.