Newbie VM Confusion

[JP]

I've used unraid for something like 10 years now, but I never used VMs since I never thought my antiquated Server could probably handle it.  Well, two days ago this server died.  I've narrowed it down to the CPU or the Motherboard.  No use in troubleshooting further and I just need to replace it.  

 

So, this is my chance to replace it with something more robust than what I have had.  Historically, I haven't need much since this PC has acted as a media server and to archive some data.  BUT I had also hoped to buy a new PC to handle my video editing since all my laptops are fairly old as well.  

 

Here is the problem.  I don't really want to buy a new server AND a new video editing machine.  I will likely opt for a good price / performance CPU / MB for the Unraid server and it specs alone would work very well for video editing.  So without ever really using a VM before (except for short periods of time at work) and never setting one up, could a VM hosted from an unraid server accomplish video editing really well?  Could I take advantage of most of the resources the Server had to offer by going this route or am I possibly better off just spending the money to keep the Server and the video editing machine separate?  

 

If having the Server do both, are there any recommendations on what I might want to consider for CPU / MB /  VC?  Any guidance is really appreciated since I'm sort of in the dark here.  Thanks.

[ghost82]

25 minutes ago, JP said:

could a VM hosted from an unraid server accomplish video editing really well?

If the vm is properly configured, without anything else running in the host (or nearly nothing running on the host) you could take into account that the vm will perform bare metal -5 - -10%; so if you assign let's say 4 cores/4 threads to the vm, it will perform like a real 4 cores/4 threads minus 5-10% in performance; this is a rough estimation.

25 minutes ago, JP said:

are there any recommendations on what I might want to consider for CPU / MB

this is only a matter of money, but make sure the cpu(s) supports vt-d and vt-x, so you will be able to passthrough hardware (descrete gpu?) through vfio to the vm.

 

About the gpu, to give you an example, I have the latest 6900xt which gives a score of about 140.000 in Geekbench (it's mac os); online results with the same gpu are higher too (about 180.000), but this may depend on cpu bottleneck as I have 2 old sandy bridge xeon cpus. I would say that also the gpu will perform near bare metal performance, vfio is good; make sure to use q35 machine type for the vm so it will be more compatible with pcie passthrough.

Edited September 14, 2022 by ghost82

[JP]

Thanks for this.  I hit of 5% - 10% is more than reasonable given where I'm coming from.

 

Honestly, some of the terms you used in response to the CPU / MB combo will be some things I'll probably need to learn about.  Those terms are new to me, but I'll start doing some research.  I was hoping more for some specific product guidance on the less expensive side (<$400 maybe for the CPU and MB).  Thanks again.