Help deciding what to do!

[HostCentricUK]

Hi guys,

I have been using unRAID on my home server for a little while now and I am thinking about doing some reconfiguration of the home storage I have.

I recently got a new gaming computer which has made my old i7 8700 gaming pc pretty much obsolete but I have been thinking if it is worth while merging my old gaming computer with my unraid server and then having unraid run a windows 11 VM to take the place of the old gaming pc.

 

The specs of the systems are:

 

Old Gaming

CPU - Intel i7-8700 (with onBoard GPU)

M/B - MSI Z390 GAMING PLUS (MS-7B51)

RAM - 32Gb DDR4 Corsair Vengeance

GPU - MSI RTX 2070s

Storage - 1Tb nVME, 500Gb nVME, 2Tb SATA, 120Gb SSD SATA

 

unRAID Server

CPU - Intel i5-8400 (with onBoard GPU)

M/B - ASRock B360M Xtreme

RAM - 32Gb DDR4 Corsair Vengeance

GPU - MSI GTX 1050Ti

Storage - 3x 6Tb SATA (2x Toshiba/Dell, 1 Western Digital), 1 Western Digital nVME Cache.

 

The proposed combined system would be:

 

CPU - Intel i7-8700 (with onBoard GPU)

M/B - MSI Z390 GAMING PLUS (MS-7B51)

RAM - 64Gb DDR4 Corsair Vengeance

GPU - MSI RTX 2070s

Storage - 2x 1Tb nVME, 3x 6TB SATA, 1x 2Tb SATA.

 

I am unsure how I would set up the VM for Windows 11 on this so that there is a second PC if needed.

I would want one of the nVME to be purely for the VM and possibly the 2Tb drive also (so not part of the main pool and possibly not visible to the unraid system or its users unless you are on the VM.

[HostCentricUK]

would the i7 8700 be strong enough to run Windows 11 VM full time along side my other docker containers?
I use unraid for Plex, Sonarr, TDARR, RADARR etc along with a minecraft instance for my kids and a valheim server for me and my clan.

 

Would you lock the VM to use 6 of the 12 threads or let it run free?