[SOLVED] Upgrade plan - VM's and required hardware in theory vs practice?

[awediohead]

Right now my unraid server is based on a 4690k which is a fairly old i5 non-hyperthreading Haswell era CPU. I'm using a z97 motherboard, 16GB of RAM (DDR3) and I have a 500GB SSD, 3x4TB hard drives with two or three more 4TB drives to add as required, plus a bunch of old 1 and 2 TB drives of questionable reliability.

 

When I started with unraid (not very long ago) I was thinking entirely in terms of media server - dockers and usenet, Lidarr, Radarr, Sonarr etc. I have a fairly large DVD and CD collection and have already saved myself countless hours of CD and DVD ripping thanks to unraid.

 

Now I'm finally understanding that so much more than I originally thought is possible in terms of also running other types of dockers, such as a family Nextcloud, or backing up family PC's automatically and of course running VM's . . .   my poor old 4690k is simply not capable of being both a good media server and doing other things well at the same time with just the four cores to play with.

 

For about a year or so, I've had a Ryzen 5 3600x & x570 PC doing duties as my daily driver: via a 5.25" bay which takes 4 x 2.5" SSD's,  I multi-boot Windows (for gaming), MacOS (for audio and office work) and whatever flavour of Linux I'm exploring at the moment - with my go to KDE Neon distro in the fourth bay. I also have an i7 4790k based build doing duties as our family windows gaming machine - mostly used by the kids and an Intel hackintosh I do most of my browsing and media consumption on - I've been using macs since '91 so it's what I'm familiar with when I just need to get stuff done efficiently, though I'm very unlikely to buy another Apple product, I do like the OS.

 

While the 3600 is 6 cores and 12 threads and will obviously walk all over any 7 year old CPU, I'm looking for a bit of a reality check about what is practically viable, as I only have theory to go on so far. I've seen Space Invader Ed's VM setup with various flavours of Linux and MacOS and Windows all being available, but are these used for specific testing purposes or can you really use a VM (properly set up with appropriate pass throughs) as a daily driver?

 

I honestly have no idea how these are used day to day, and most of my experience of people running VM's is of you tubers making excuses for stuff not working when running 'x' distro as they try it out, before going bare metal if they like it. The inference always being that the OS is only going to run properly on bare metal . . . but I'm beginning to suspect that's more a limitation of the hardware and maybe a historical assumption - I mean from before 12 and 16 core CPU's were 'consumer' available?

 

By contrast if you have 12 cores and 24 threads to play with, say with a 3900x, with 4 cores and 8 threads assignable to two different VMs and still have more processing power left over than my current old i5 has in total, can those VMs be used as reliable daily drivers? I mean that you'd assume to be reliable enough to get work done with?

 

Likewise, while I don't play a lot of games for lack of time, and understand that it's perfectly feasible to run a Windows VM just for gaming with gfx card passed through - I've previously thought of it more as a 'proof of concept' than something people choose to do, especially as it's so easy to just multi-boot whatever OS you happen to need . . .  however I'm really intrigued by the notion of having one machine that's perfectly capable of doing what we're currently using three to do. (Especially as the upgrade to a secondhand 3900x or 3950x is eventually going to be affordable now that 5900's and 5950 CPUs are finally becoming available)

 

I'd really like to hear about what folks here actually do with their machines? Do you have a multi core beast that does everything or do you split tasks, such as media server, gaming machine, browsing and media consumption across multiple machines?

Cheers

 

Edited May 20, 2021 by awediohead
Marking as solved as info found elsewhere

[awediohead]

How are you using your unraid server

Actually found most of what I needed to know in this thread in the Lounge of all places :)

Marking this as solved as obviously the same conversation is going on elsewhere already.