Gaming VM Hardware Check

[johnestan]

My 3770k gaming pc bit the dust the other day. My unraid box still going strong on a AMD A4-3400, but it's about time to upgrade that too. I was planning out a single box unraid/gaming vm solution. I don't think it would be much cheaper than doing two separate boxes, but I think it would be a fun project. Can anyone double check my part list and answers few questions? 

 

Planning on buying (once the 5900x shows back up at MSRP)

CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X

Motherboard: ASRock X570 TAICHI

RAM: 2 X 16GB DDR4

A CPU Cooler

 

Already Have

Video Card: GTX 2070

Power Supply: Corsair 650W

Mass Storage: 6 X Sata HDDs

Case: Rosewill RSV-L4500

LSI Sata Card for future HDD expansion

Boot Storage: 2 Sata SSDs (1 for gaming pc and 1 for unraid docker)

 

1. Can I passthrough a single sata SSD for the gaming VM, or do I need to go ahead and switch to M.2?

2. My end goal is to fill the 16x PCI slots with a gaming gpu passed though, the LSI card, and something like a 1050ti for 4k transcoding in my plex docker. While using 2 of the M.2 slots if possible. The PCI lanes stuff is kind of confusing to me, will I be able to run this config?

3. How many cores should I leave for unraid?

4. Is it possible to run another windows VM (without a GPU) for something like Blue Iris?

5. Will the gaming VM be able to access the unriad storage at full speed? This is a big advantage of doing one box for me if so. That way I don't have to invest in a 10g network yet. 

 

Thanks for your help. 

[SeeGee]

That cpu supports 24 pcie lanes if I recall, that means each graphics card will take 8 each, and the lsi card will use another 8 which means that you may not have enough to use the m.2, and definitely not both m.2 slots. The best thing to do is to download the manual for the motherboard and look into the details... Many boards disable a few sata ports if using a second m.2. A lack of pcie lanes is a major limitation of desktop hardware used as a server. Motherboards are often configured so that the 3rd 16x slot, and the second m.2 are tied to the chipset rather than the cpu, which can give you the ability to connect more pcie devices, but the connection between the cpu and the chipset is only a 4x connection, meaning that you only get 4x performance shared amongst all devices connected to the chipset.