Hi Folks,
I need some advice about my Unraid setup. I am trying to run multiple performance VMs with hardware passthrough + underlying UNRAID doing disk management + Dockers. I have been reading the forums, and I have not come across this exact situation yet.
Hardware/Software:
500GB 960 EVO NVMe, 250GB 840 EVO SSD, Bunch of spinners.
3 Video cards, 1 Inateck USB3.0 x7 Card.
22-Core Xeon Server Chip + Gigabyte X99 Ultimate Gamer
Unraid v6.3.2, Win10Pro, Win7Pro, Dockers
My issues started when I completed my transfer of my old bare-metal Win7 machine to a VM. I built the VirtualDisk from the old 840 SSD, and got it all working, including the Video and USB passthrough. My Win10 Game machine VM was also working with Video and USB passthrough. Both VMs had "200GB" drives and I had ~100GB for Docker cache. Life was grand.
Then I went to expand my cache space with the old SSD. When I added the 250GB to the Cache Pool, disaster. I expected 750GB, but Unraid moved this to Raid1, dropped the total drive space to a "reported" 375GB and now dockers and VMs would pause, crash, etc. After some reading I figured that I was really only getting ~250GB worth of usable space. After walking through the "Replace your Cache Drive" instructions, I have gotten back to having a 500 and 250 separated.
Here is my dilemma. How do I expand my cache space and keep the performance of the NVMEe drive for my VMs? Do I set the 840 SSD drive as the only cache drive in the pool and use the NVMe as a "free" drive in the system? Can I trick UNRAID into giving me the full 750GB with the VMs residing on the NVMe drive for performance?
I really want the speed of the SSD caching drive for the large array of spinners, but I don't need the Raid 1 nature of btfrs. All that caching space is for temp stuff and backed up VMs.
Thanks for the help in advance.
-Wolfman