Should I even unraid?

[Nicolai]

Hello to all of you capable Ladies and Gentlemen.

 

The why

I have come across unraid from a tech related video on youtube a while ago, and I've been fascinated with it ever since. I still don't know too much about it, for reasons that'll become obvious, but I'm very interested in playing around with it! Why? Because I'm that kind of geek, that just like to play with toys, just to learn and try. I cannot for the life of me explain why it's unraid that caught me, when there's several other home server solutions, but to my untrained and newbie eye, unraid looks like it's the best all round playground for a tech interested dork like me.

 

The what

I mainly use a PC to play videogames, so running a windows VM to play my videogames on is a no brainer. I'm imagining this will end up being auto loaded, and yes, I do need to shut it down every single night. But I'd also like to be able to install other OS and load those up in a VM in time, so I can have a chance to learn those too, maybe learn about dockers for a movie night or making my own website or anything that I can do with unraid. The parity option for data security is also a big plus for me, as I do like to protect my drives and files, and as far as I can understand, unraid has some system to protect against bitrot too (?).

 

The toys

I will be running unraid on my only PC. I'm not fortunate enough to be able to afford another system "just" to play around and learn. This will be going on my only PC, and that's what's been holding me back from pulling the plug and getting a few things I would need to invest in for this project to even allow me to take any kind of advantage of it. My current PC is running the following hardware;

- Asus Z590-P Prime motherboard

- Intel Core i7-11700K

- Corsair Vengeance 32 GB DDR4-3200

- Samsun 980 1TB M.2 NVMe

- Asus GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB TUF

 

I know this will probably be far too much for most tasks this system would run, but as state I do enjoy playing videogames too, and I've come to learn there's a few complications with playing on a VM and some anticheat software too, which I'm hoping to find a solution for too.

 

The how

The entire idea will result in getting a rack chassis, but installing it as a drawer in my living room, as I do live in an apartment with limited space. This would solve the aesthetics and allow me to use it with my TV using either Steam Link or direct connection. I've also learned about USB-DOM devices, but if they're worth it for this project I don't know, but I do believe it's a neat little option to have.

 

 

So, with all of that, what do you educated people think? Should I just stop this idea as it is, or is it actually worth moving forward with, even though it'll only be limited what I do use unraid and it's functionality, due to my working ours and other factors in my personal life?

 

Best regards and thank you so much for your time and advice.

[ghost82]

12 hours ago, Nicolai said:

- Asus Z590-P Prime motherboard

- Intel Core i7-11700K

- Corsair Vengeance 32 GB DDR4-3200

- Samsun 980 1TB M.2 NVMe

- Asus GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB TUF

 

I switched from bare metal to vms on my 2 servers 5 years ago and I never regret it; note that this is valid for any linux host running qemu/libvirt/kvm for virtualization, with unraid only being much more user friendly.

The switch allowed me to:

1. install a mac os vm with gpu passthrough that works a lot better than the old genuine macbook pro

2. install windows 11 on an unsupported hardware, thanks to tpm emulation build in qemu

3. run whatever os I want: at the current time I have a windows 11 vm (work and gaming), a mac os vm (work) and a kali linux vm (programming)

 

About your hardware it's perfectly fine for virtualization, with that 11700K you should have no issues in passing through the secondary 3070 gpu to vm(s).

Unraid needs at least one array to work: this means that one hard drive is dedicated to the array: since you only have one hd, the nvme drive, you are somehow limited in dedicating that nvme drive for the array, and save and run virtual disks for vms on the array.

To start experimenting this is enough.

 

In my case, at the current time, in one of my server, I have:

1. a motherboard with 2 sata controllers built-in

2. 4 hard drives: 3 rotationals (1 for array, 2 for smb shares), 2 ssds, one for windows 11, one for mac os); linux vm is installed on a vdisk on the array (I don't need too much performance for this vm); the 2 ssds are attached to the 2nd sata controller which is passed through to the vms; the hd array and the other 2 rotational drives for smb are attached to the 1st sata controller

 

I have 2 pcie gpus, one dedicated for the host (it's a very old nvidia gpu) and one 6900xt which I'm passing through to vms. But this only because I don't have an igpu, this is not your case.

 

As far as performances I'm getting quite close to bare metal ones.

Edited October 26, 2022 by ghost82

[Nicolai]

6 hours ago, ghost82 said:

About your hardware it's perfectly fine for virtualization, with that 11700K you should have no issues in passing through the secondary 3070 gpu to vm(s).

Unraid needs at least one array to work: this means that one hard drive is dedicated to the array: since you only have one hd, the nvme drive, you are somehow limited in dedicating that nvme drive for the array, and save and run virtual disks for vms on the array.

To start experimenting this is enough.

Aside from everything i need to learn before even starting to understand what you said before this, I do have some old mechanical harddrives in it, but they're used for storage (movies, pictures, ebooks and more), these are the ones are wanted to protect from bitrot.

My plan was to eventually get some 2.5" SSDs, nas rated, and migrate the data to those somehow. Got my eye on a bay from silverstone technology, which would allow me to hotswap them in, although that's just for the geek factor, since I won't really be needing it.

I have also been looking at NVMe options for a pcie slot, but as far as I understand, I'll be struggling with pcie lanes with my current hardware?

[klipp01]

I believe you can use another plug in USB drive and assign it as an array device

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