bluepr0

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    Final Bachelor Build - Xeon-D vSAN Cluster for Plex Redundancy

    in Unraid Compulsive Design

    Posted

    Loved to see the process, thanks for sharing it!

     

    May I ask what's all this equipment for? (feel free to not answer, I'm just curious to see what you can do with so much power!). Also, are you going to use one of the VMs to work (if you happen to need one, of course) or you have a dedicated machine for you? (just wondering to see how serious people takes VMs to do "real" work)

     

    Thanks a lot!

    Why there isn't an official OS X Template

    in VM Templates

    Posted

    Hello guys!

     

    For another reason (trying to get the OSK key from my Mac) I found this website which says

     

    Legal Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Taking into account that OS X is now officially supported on commercial virtualization solutions such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels, and after a careful reading of Apple's OS X EULA (which states that "[...] you are granted a [...] license to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-Branded computer at any one time"), it is my belief that it's OK to run Mac OS X as a QEMU guest, provided the host hardware is a genuine, Apple-manufactured Mac computer, running an arbitrary (e.g. Linux) host OS. This happens to be how I'm using it, but YMMV.

     

    I thought that this might be only referring to OS X VMWare's app, but creating an OS X VM is also supported on ESXI 6

     

    So, shouldn't unRAID have official support for an OS X template then? Other huge companies are doing it which leads me to think that they find out if it was legal with an army of lawyers. I could be running unNRAID on genuine Apple hardware so having support for adding a OS X VM seems to not violate any laws.

    SSD performance/benchmark on VM

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    Thanks daigo and gridrunner! Would love to improve as much as I can my VMs so I can actually work with it.

     

    My idea is to have very powerful hardware so even considering overhead and latency it won't be noticeable (or actually it will be even more performance from my current iMac)... for work usage (graphic design is what I mostly do)

     

    Can't wait to hear more! Also this week I should be receiving the rest of components to finally build my own unRAID box!

     

    I honestly thought that passing through an entire SSD would give almost bare-metal performance (as it does with GPUs)... So if performance is not that good it might not be worth to have a separate SSD and just use the cache pool.

    USB devices: non available

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    I'm not familiar with unRAID yet but it might be because the disk cannot be mounted for some reason. Have you tried using the Unnasigned disk plugin (or similar name, sorry I'm on my phone). I think it's used to mount/unmount drives separately from the array and maybe it could help or give more light about the problem

    SSD performance/benchmark on VM

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    I'm trying to figure out the results as my ssd's are capable of 2500 read and 1500 write. but not sure if any numbers showed that or is it all wrong due to cached issues?

    I think they are off because caching stuff, I have no idea how to avoid this other than passing-through the SSD entirely :(

    SSD performance/benchmark on VM

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    Thanks Lebowski! the problem with using the cache pool is that you get this weird cached-unrealistic results :(. I think that the best way to test real performance is to passthrough the disk completely and see what results gives there

     

    Thanks a lot anyway!

    Please help me decide move to unRAID!

    in General Support

    Posted

    Hey!

     

    I’m absolutely new to unRAID… actually I haven’t build my rig yet as I’m waiting for components to arrive, however I’ve been researching a lot because I’m thinking about use it as my NAS (with a few VMs + dockers and more) but also have an OS X VM to work there

     

    I will try to reply to the questions I know

     

    1. It seems that for CPU you will mostly get bare-metal performance. For GPU I’ve read different cases where users were having for example good FPS on their Windows VMs but not as good as bare-metal, so this might depend on your GPU, MB, etc. For SSD you can either have a vidks on your cache pool (seems to have not so good performance) or alternatively you can passthrough the entire controller (for example the PCI controller for each Intel 750) which seems to get almost bare-metal performance

     

    2. I guess you can passthrough more than one GPU but not sure if you then can make it work in SLI/Crossfire

     

    3. It seems you can

     

    4. Yep

     

    5. You can do both

     

    6. Not sure about this one, but I guess you can’t… only passthrough the whole controller. In any case, depending on the usage you may want to lose a bit of bare-metal performance in favour of reduced network usage (passthrough NIC will be limited to its physical speed while using the virtual ones you can get higher speeds inside your unRAID box)

     

    7. I guess only @jonp can answer that. If you use vdisk it seems easier to backup them in an incremental way.

     

    8. No idea

     

    9. AFAIK you will need a dedicated graphic card for unRAID only if you do passthrough to a VM and of course you only have one GPU

     

    10. I guess requirements are on the LT website, about the other question for what I read it seems LT recommends to leave one core for unRAID

     

    11. No idea

     

    12. I think you can do almost that, but leaving 1 core for unRAID and a bit of RAM too.

    USB devices: non available

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    You are not giving too much info about your setup but as far as I know to have hot plug and play support on USB you need to passthrough the entire controller, otherwise I think you need to have the disk connected before you fire up the VM

    I need a recommendation to a CPU & MB

    in Motherboards and CPUs

    Posted

    People might kill me for this recommendation but the "ES" (Engineer samples) are reeeeally cheap and you can get an incredible CPU for less than 100$. In my case for example, I got an E5-2698v4 for 500€ while the retail price is around 4500€ I think.

     

    I also love the MB I bought, it has 10 SATA, IPMI, 7 PCIe, etc. Check my signature for more details.

    ***GUIDE*** Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan – VM on unRAID

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    Hello guys,

     

    I'm trying to read my OSK key from my Mac but I'm unable to. I've tried using smc_read from http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/OSXKVM/ and I get

     

    REDACTED-THANK-YOU-FREAKIN-APPLE-ENGINEERS

     

    I've also tried SmcDumpKey from http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/OSXKVM/#sec_3_2_1 but it seems not not work in a VM of Linux as I get the same as above

     

    I also tried to boot from a Live USB distro natively on my iMac and MacBook Pro (debian and ubuntu) and still getting the same results when dumping OSK0 and OSK1 keys

    ***GUIDE*** Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan – VM on unRAID

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    btw gridrunner! how many cores do you share with your OS X VM to get 26k of performance? Do you use it on a regular basis? I'm thinking about create a VM and use it to work to replace my iMac 27 late 2013 i7!

     

    it took all 12 cores 24 threads to get that score. If you want me to benchmark other core counts let me know. My base core speed is 2.4 with all core turbo of 2.7

     

    I use it often but dont run more than 4 cores usually. Just wanted to see what benchmark i could get with all my cores assigned

     

    Ah, gotcha!

     

    Btw, do you have working App Store and iMessage?

     

    Thanks a lot!

    How much crazy it sounds to do real work with a VM?

    in VM Engine (KVM)

    Posted

    Hello guys,

     

    I can't wait to get my new PC components and finally be able to put together my first unRAID build (in my signature). I've been reading a lot about unRAID, virtualisation, dockers, plugins and much more so I can get a clear picture of what is, how to use it and what I can expect from it.

     

    Specially I've been reading a lot about the virtualisation side because I feel like having many devices for different things doesn't make too much sense anymore. For example, I currently have a QNAP NAS, a Mac mini with pfSense acting as a router, an iMac 27 to do work (graphic design), a raspberry with some home automation things, etc.

     

    My plan is to build an unRAID build with all this in one, hence such a powerful CPU. The Windows VMs will be only for testing, not for "real" usage. My idea was to create an El Capitan's VM and work with it (I know I will need to get an external GPU as well, but that will come). Considering I can share a lot of cores with it plus I could passthrough a PCIe SSD only with it I think I can get almost bare-metal performance, or at least I will get waaaaay more performance than with my current iMac 27 late 2013

     

    This won't be an immediate change, instead I will just start testing and finding out what things I will be able to get working perfectly, which ones won't and so on. My intention for this post was to just ask...

     

    1. Is there anyone doing real work with a VM?

    2. How's the stability of unRAID and the VM?

    3. Any original OS X feature/capability/other that it won't be possible to use in a VM?

    4. I'm not clear on how the array will work with the VM. If I passthrough a SSD disk to the VM... if I have to stop the array (or if it gets stop for some reason?) will my VM stop working too?

     

    I will be very happy to read any other info/advice/suggestion you want to provide to learn more about this matter.

     

    Thanks a lot!