General Questions about VM's with unraid

[guayocampo]

Hello party people!

 

my Pc has...

Ryzen 7 5800x

32 GB of Ram (3200)

RTX 3060 Ti (8GB)

1 TB nvme (planing of using as cache)

3 HHD of 4TB nas Drive ( still have to purchase)

 

Im an old guy here i do not know much of NAS at at so please be patient with this noob.... haha

 

to get in context here, I have 2 kids and me, and Im looking forward to create a NAS with unraid to use VM's so my kids and me can play on the network games and for the use of plex (plex always on 1080p never more)

 

My question's are.... Can I use 3 Vm to run games like minecraft or any emulator for nintendo switch example yuzu at the same time ?????

and 2 add more stress to the pc can I run 2 plex simultanusly 2 those 3 VM's .

 

My kids had 2 old laptops they are pentium 8 gb of ram nothing special ( looking forward to login from the network to the vm so they can play)

 

I know that I pushing to hard, and looking forward to be with a lot of luck. Can some let me know if I cand do this or if I need more hardware or if Unraid can do that.

 

Thank you !!! in advance for reading my question's 

 

[ConnerVT]

Like most things related to computers, the answer is... It depends...

 

The hardware you listed is strong, and capable of doing all that you say you wish to do.  Where the "It depends" comes in is if you are hammering the machine by doing everyone of those at the same time.  I'm also an "old guy" who remembers when games/software came with a listing of minimum requirements.  Yeah, the game runs, but the performance wasn't always as smooth as you wish.

 

Plex really doesn't put much demand on the server when not transcoding.  Playing video at home usually is Direct Play, so the server is basically reading the file and sending to the player (client).  You need to assess what demands the VMs you are going to run will have on disk I/O and the cpu.  Then the questions become how frequently will 3 users be hitting the server at the same time, and how much money do you want to spend.

[guayocampo]

Thank you for the reply @ConnerVT I really apreciated. I was thinking on spliting the cpu equally. Correct me if wrong please. the ryzen had 16 core so I was thinking to place 4 core for each VM and leave another 4 for the use of the NAS. And do the same for the RAM 8 GB for each.

 

For the VM's on the weekends I usually play with my kids at least a few hours, Im not looking to use the VM's on high settigns, I was thinking in the use between low to med setting's but yes the 3 vm's at the same time. for a few hours.

 

Hey @ConnerVT what do you mean with how much money I want to spend?? and alos what do you mean with if I'm going to run a disk I/O and the cpu.

 

 

[ConnerVT]

I'm no expert with VMs, but understand a bit of them.  Hopefully someone else will jump in and comment (and correct me, as needed).

 

Some hardware resources are easy to split up to different tasks.  But some things are more difficult.

 

Ryzen 5800X is a 8 core (+ 8 "hyperthread") processor.  Yes, you can pin the various threads of the processor to dedicate them to a particular VM.  So effectively, each VM plus the OS will be running on a 2 cores + 2 threads - the equivalent of a processor from nearly a decade ago.  So none of them will seem like they are smoking along on a current $450 processor.

 

Other functions of the system are still shared.  There is only one memory controller, so when all 4 (3 VM + Unraid OS) are running at once, each will be vying for the same memory bandwidth.

 

It can get more congested accessing storage.  This is significantly slower than DRAM memory.  I believe best known practice is to locate drives for VM access to a Unassigned Devices drive, and I'd recommend SSD over a spinner if three different systems are trying to access at once.