tdallen

Hello and welcome. It's possible to do what you want with unRAID. You will, however, need a beefy tower setup to run 4 windows VMs. What do you want to run in the VMs? Note - unRAID isn't a hypervisor. It's an operating system with a long history as a NAS, and a really nice hypervisor implementation based on KVM that is now included. What you'd like to do is still "enthusiast level" stuff on unRAID, but it can work.

Hello and welcome. The Core i3-530 should be fine for basic NAS and streaming so long as you don't plan to do a lot of transcoding. If you need transcoding then you might be able to transcode a single 1080p stream on that CPU - you can give it a try with an unRAID trial license. I also recommend at least 4GB of RAM though in theory you could run with 2GB.

You might get lucky and find a fellow Australian who looks in on this thread and is able to make a motherboard recommendation. Unfortunately for those of us who live in the States we really don't know what available there :(. But, if you can post some motherboards that *are* currently available there we can offer comments.

My cache drive is about 70GB used right now. It's got a 20GB docker image file, and ~50GB of random stuff - files to be uploaded, recently downloaded, the data files for various Dockers including Plex and several others, etc. So 120GB would be fine as a starting point since you have the drive already but I'd advise anyone buying a drive to start at 250GB.

I would also recommend a cache drive, it is the defacto application drive for unRAID. And trurl's recommendation to use an SSD is excellent. That said, you can use one of your HDs for the cache drive if you're not ready to make the jump to an SSD.

I had the AOC-SAS2LP with an older Asus motherboard. I do not run VMs on that machine. I had problems with that setup from the unRAID 6 beta days until I got rid of the card last year. I think it is a decent piece of hardware but the driver/software compatibility issues on unRAID aren’t worth dealing with. Get an LSI based card.

Hi - unRAID isn't a hypervisor. It's an operating system, with an included hypervisor. I think you'd be happy using unRAID - but you need to plan for sufficient resources for the operating system to run. That includes at least a core (with hyper-threaded companion) and some RAM.

Hi - Take a look in Community Applications, there are several Dockers for this purpose. Duplicati is well liked.

If you plan to run any heavy downloaders/unpackers then an MLC based SSD (typically Pro models) is a better buy than a TLC model for the higher TBW rating.

I think that's a good idea. It isn't that unRAID can't operate under a Hypervisor - it can. But in trying to get a hypervisor enabled OS running under another hypervisor you'd be forwarding the last page of the book without having read everything before that...

Maybe run a long test if you haven’t yet?

Just curious, why would you want to combine Proxmox and unRAID? unRAID ships with a hypervisor, KVM...

Hello and welcome. 8GB is probably enough, but I'd almost always recommend putting 16GB into a new machine if you can. You could almost certainly get away with a 550w power supply in a mini-ITX build, I'd run a PS calculator. Regarding CPU choices, the 4600 is a Kaby Lake 1151 CPU and the 8100 is a Coffee Lake 1151 CPU - so keep in mind that even though they use the same socket they'll need different motherboards. Regarding transcoding, if you really plan to support 3 transcoded streams the Pentium G4600 (5133 Passmarks) wouldn't be enough unless you also plan to use hardware transcoding. The rule of thumb is 2,000 Passmarks per 1080p stream, and don't forget to leave some capacity for unRAID itself. The Core i3-8100 is a better choice (8094 Passmarks) if you plan to support several transcoded streams. This is an inexact science, though - the source material, the capabilities of your players, and whether you are using hardware transcoding all affect transcoding.

Hi - No, KVM doesn't support his on unRAID. Typically any kind of sync between servers is more of an rsync script based solution.

Data disks don't have to be the same size. The Parity disk needs to be as large as, or larger than, the largest data disk. Cache disks don't have to be the same size... but you frequently wind up with wasted space if you they aren't, assuming you want to run the normal RAID-1 profile.

I run the stock fan and it's a lot cooler than that - high 20's, low 30's.

Most external UPS's have a USB connector cable to run up to your computer.

Hi - Your build is looking good but I really feel like OC'ing an unRAID server is questionable. If you are using it for data storage, your main priority should be stability - it's a fault tolerant system with built in redundancy. I recommend that anything you do to your server should be with the goal of rock solid stability. Besides, the 8700K is a heck of a fast CPU already.

No you don't need to use the same order but there are two considerations. Assuming you are using unRAID 5 or 6+, unRAID tracks disks by serial number and will find them regardless of which port you put them on - but that's different than the old unRAID 4 series. Also, if your disks are on a RAID controller instead of a JBOD HBA then the serial numbers can get messed up by the RAID controller and cause issues.

Personally I'd want 2 cores for the VM if I was using it for a daily driver. So, are 2 cores (7700K) enough for unRAID and all Dockers? It probably depends on whether you want transcoding on those Plex streams...

I would not attempt to run a Windows VM on unRAID with anything less than a Core i5 and 16GB of RAM. Many people will suggest a Core i7 or Xeon and 32GB. A Core i3-4130 with 8GB would be Ok for unRAID and some Dockers. Unfortunately I don't use Homebridge so I can't offer any help there.

The current forum search is awful - surprisingly awful in this day and age. It's impacting the ability of people to help themselves.

Hi - The best way to run Plex is as a Docker. You can also run from a VM, but your new system is under-powered to run VMs. An SSD is recommended for a cache drive, though a spinner will work. If you decide to run VMs then yes, it's best to start with the VM image on the cache drive. But again, you'd want more memory and a bigger processor if you want to run VMs.

Yep, that's the basic approach for pass-through.

Sounds like a good plan. You get a little more performance as you go to the G4620 and then the Core i3-7100 and 7300 - if you can get one of those for a few $ more it might be worth it. The best discussion I've seen on HW transcoding recently was the one below, but you dropped in on it so you probably saw the rest of it.