1. Highly unlikely. Passing through iGPU is already an iffy affair to begin with. Making it work with MacOS is... I'm tempted to say impossible.
You are better off getting a dedicated GPU for the MacOS VM (you might want to google separately whether it would work with a Hackintosh and whether it would work with an Unraid VM).
interesting, I’ve been reading that as a fair chunk of the Mac machines use the same iGPU that is in the 9900KS that it should for the most part just work if it has direct hardware access, the concern being that unraid likes to take the first video device. Also my MB does not have room for a second DGPU, it only has 1 16x and one 4x via the PCH (yay intel CPUs only having like 21 lanes!)
2. Most now-ish chipsets have USB 2.0 and 3.1 on the same controller that is virtually impossible to be passed through. Usually the 3.0 controller is in its own IOMMU group so can be passed through. Note the "usually" since different motherboard, chipset and BIOS version can have very different IOMMU grouping so it's hard to tell for sure.
With regards to USB PCIe card, you might have to search on the forum. I vaguely remember a few of them don't like being passed through for whatever reasons.
You might also want to consider what I call "warm plug" for Unraid. There is an Unraid plugin that allows you to "plug" USB devices on non-passed-through controller to any VM via the GUI. So you are not hot-plugging but you also don't need to turn off the VM to plug (and replug). Hence my coiled term "warm plug".
that is what I am hoping, that the 3.0 is separated from the USB 2, with that said hot plug is a must for me, though if this “warm plug” could be controlled from within windows and Mac OS from taskbars NOT a web GUI I would be interested, but I doubt that it works this way.
3. 1xNVMe per VM would only work if they are in separate IOMMU groups (assuming you want best possible performance, which requires PCIe passthrough, which needs cooperating IOMMU groups). Often if they are not, ACS Override should help but again, no guarantee.
Share doc is easy, just unassigned device mount and smb share.
Scratch disk is not easy. To share the disk, it has to be done via network share, which is usually not good for scratch disk due to added latency. If you ata-device-pass-through then it can only be used by 1 VM at a time.
ok and yes that is what I am hoping, with that said how hard would it be to swap what VM has access to the scratch disk if I where to make it single VM?
4. Don't do RAID-0. Mixing RAID with Unraid is asking for troubles.
Optain won't work in a VM the same way it would with barebone. You might as well consider it like a super-low-latency NVMe SSD.
oh I was planing to do The raid via the windows disk management utility, not MB level, and with the disks passed direct to the VM I am thinking this would not be a problem.... with this slight clarification could I get at least raid to work? Also bummer about the optain not being an option.... but I suspected as much...
5. Don't know. If connected through USB then probably yes. Any other way = highly unlikely.
the RGB on the ram communicates via the ram slot.... so probably not then... bummer...
6. Cool
7. Your plan is fine, except for the overclocking. You should not be overclocking Unraid (beyond the automated Turbo Boost, which Unraid has a plugin for you to control). Stability on a virtualised environment trumps any speed gain you can get beyond Turbo Boost.
Particularly, RAID-0 is already bad enough. RAID-0 + Overclock = you might as well plan to lose data.
i was planning to do the OC MB level, and make sure it’s stable in windows before even messing with unraid, with that said the entire reason for me picking the 9900KS is that it’s pretty easy to get a stable 5.2GHz all core OC, also would only be messing with the boost clock not the base clock.
And I will look into this