What hardware will be needed for unRAID fork/x64/OS/Host machine?


JustinChase

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With all the talk about a new version of unRAID, which will allow unRAID to act as the host on a full Linux build, and using KVM, PXE, EXSi, etc to run VM's for other things, including the things we currently need plugins to run (SABnzbd, SickBeard, etc), I am reviewing my hardware for 'compatibility', and see that my processor does not allow Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d).

 

This seems to mean that I cannot do PCI pass thru, which sounds like it's a limitation preventing taking full advantage of this new structure/architecture.  So, I'm looking to upgrade my processor.  My motherboard only supports Ivy Bridge, and I don't want to upgrade the motherboard at this time, so I'm limiting my search to Socket LGA1155 processors for this reason.

 

It seems that only the i7 offers hyperthreading.  i3 doesn't have any processors that include Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d), and the i5 line has many processors that have VT-d capability, but none offer hyperthreading, or HD4000 IGP.  The only processor I can find that offers VT-d and hyperthreading and HD4000 IGP is the Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge processor, which sells for about $300US.

 

So is Hyperthreading and an HD4000 IGP worth the extra $100 over the Core i5-3350, which has VT-d and sells for about $180US?

 

I have a HD4000 IGP on my current processor, and it handles most video fine, but struggles on difficult videos.

 

The 'minimum' video card recommended to take full advantage of madVR is a GeForce GTX 660, which start at about $190US.

 

So, any suggestions, recommendations or thoughts on what to do here?

 

Also, what other things might one need to consider when hardware shopping in preparation for this change?

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Ideally, it will replace my unRAID machine and my HTPC, and might serve as another HTPC to serve another TV in the house.

 

The 'problem' is that I have no good idea what exactly I can do with it, so its hard to say what I NEED at this point.  I'm just trying to 'future-proof' this box as much as reasonably possible, based on what I know so far.

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FWIW, I would wait until there is an unRAID fork that you can actually download. This way others can test the waters and can provide you with real world results instead of "well this should work"... I am also very interested in this as I may be able to replace three computers with one. I just cannot justify spending $300 on a new CPU that I currently don't need, especially if nothing becomes of the fork. 

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Ideally, it will replace my unRAID machine and my HTPC, and might serve as another HTPC to serve another TV in the house.

 

The 'problem' is that I have no good idea what exactly I can do with it, so its hard to say what I NEED at this point.  I'm just trying to 'future-proof' this box as much as reasonably possible, based on what I know so far.

ATM you would probably need an AMD graphics card per virtualized htpc and then use the igp for the host if required. If you use GPU hardware for rendering pipeline then you shouldn't need that much CPU power. A well ventilated case is obviously important if you have 2 cards cranking out jinc3 scaled videos at the same time.

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Definitely don't buy a Supermicro X10SAT if you want your host OS to have HDMI audio whilst doing passthrough of any kind.

 

They just replied to my email, after a week of discussing the issue with this:

 

This is a desktop boards, and it is not designed for Xen or other virtualization applications, only for desktop OS. Therefore compatibility is unknown.

 

I am fuming!

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ATM you would probably need an AMD graphics card per virtualized htpc and then use the igp for the host if required.

 

Are you sure I can't use the IGP for the HTPC VM?  Although an HD4000 can't do everything without issue, it does a great job for most of my content, so I'd prefer to use that for one of the HTPC machines, if possible.  I have an ATI 5450 card which I'm currently using for the unRAID box, and don't think it will do a very good job for an HTPC, so I'd rather use them this way, it at all possible.

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I have an ATI 5450 card which I'm currently using for the unRAID box, and don't think it will do a very good job for an HTPC, so I'd rather use them this way, it at all possible.

 

Almost any $15 video card you purchase can easily handle 1080p with HD Audio no problems. Even with a 6+ year old CPU, the CPU utilization when playing 1080p with HD Audtio should drop to 5 - 10%.

 

The trick is, enabling the Hardware Video Acceleration on your Host and in the VMs where you passed through the $15 Video Card.

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Almost any $15 video card you purchase can easily handle 1080p with HD Audio no problems. Even with a 6+ year old CPU, the CPU utilization when playing 1080p with HD Audtio should drop to 5 - 10%.

 

If you're just passing a 1080p encoded video to a 1080p display, this is generally true.  However, once you start scaling video (up or down) and deinterlacing, IVTC, smooth motion, etc, a cheap card just isn't going to cut it.  It's generally accepted that a 660 GeForce card or ATI 7xxx card is needed to handle madVR at the highest settings.  The HD4000 won't handle it all, but handles most of my content without issues that bother me.

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If you're just passing a 1080p encoded video to a 1080p display, this is generally true.  However, once you start scaling video (up or down) and deinterlacing, IVTC, smooth motion, etc, a cheap card just isn't going to cut it.  It's generally accepted that a 660 GeForce card or ATI 7xxx card is needed to handle madVR at the highest settings.  The HD4000 won't handle it all, but handles most of my content without issues that bother me.

 

I suspect that a large majority are not scaling and doing all the things you are suggestion.

 

Also, with H.265 out and with releases of H.265 Movies and TV Shows starting to being posted "in the usual places".... This is going to change some things for us this year also.

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I suspect that a large majority are not scaling and doing all the things you are suggestion.

 

Also, with H.265 out and with releases of H.265 Movies and TV Shows starting to being posted "in the usual places".... This is going to change some things for us this year also.

 

I agree, but since I will do those things, I figured I'd try to find out what is possible.

 

Can you say for sure if I could pass the IGP to a VM, and pass the ATI card to unRAID, or is that just not possible?

 

I just read your post in another thread saying that unRAID in a distro is unlikely to happen, and a bad idea, for many reasons.

 

I actually was surprised to read that, as I thought you had been saying you had done it in 30 minutes on your system.  However, I was/am still a little fuzzy on all the iterations, so I probably just misunderstood what was proposed/possible.

 

I guess what I think I want is for unRAID to run as a host, on a supported distro, with the ability to run Windows in a VM, and run it as my HTPC, with full/direct graphics card and TV card support.

 

Ideally, the HTPC would have 'direct' access to the hard drives in unRAID, to prevent any spin-up or unzipping, or any other processes from disturbing video playback on the HTPC VM.

 

Also, I'd like to run SABnzbd, sickbeard, and a few other things as full apps, and not as plugins.

 

Finally, not needing a dedicated cache drive, without losing performance would be a nice touch.

 

Sorry for the OT wandering.

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Can you say for sure if I could pass the IGP to a VM, and pass the ATI card to unRAID, or is that just not possible?

 

To my knowledge, you cannot passthrough IGP in Xen or KVM. KVM is close but I haven't checked / tested that latest patches to see where it is at / how stable it is.

 

I just read your post in another thread saying that unRAID in a distro is unlikely to happen, and a bad idea, for many reasons.

 

I actually was surprised to read that, as I thought you had been saying you had done it in 30 minutes on your system.  However, I was/am still a little fuzzy on all the iterations, so I probably just misunderstood what was proposed/possible.

 

I do not think it's bad but I do not see how Lime Technology the way it is constructed today could pull it off successfully. One person who works a 6 day a week job (unRAID is not his full time job)... There is no way in hell I think he can support / maintain it like normal Linux Distros are (which have teams of people). Users would quickly not be able to do X, Y and Z because the unRAID doesn't have X, Y and Z updates, apps, binaries.

 

Not to mention, I don't think he will distribute an unRAID package because the various Linux Distros / Communities would raise Holy Hell / file complaints with FOSS / FSF, etc. that he is distributing a binary only package (which you pay for) in their Distro without all the source code. Of course Lime Technology code release the source code but bye bye revenue stream.

 

I guess what I think I want is for unRAID to run as a host, on a supported distro, with the ability to run Windows in a VM, and run it as my HTPC, with full/direct graphics card and TV card support.

 

Ideally, the HTPC would have 'direct' access to the hard drives in unRAID, to prevent any spin-up or unzipping, or any other processes from disturbing video playback on the HTPC VM.

 

Also, I'd like to run SABnzbd, sickbeard, and a few other things as full apps, and not as plugins.

 

Finally, not needing a dedicated cache drive, without losing performance would be a nice touch.

 

You will have the ability to do all of this unRAID 6.0. He is close to releasing the first beta according what he said in the Status Thread in the Announcements forum if you haven't read through it yet.

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Are you sure I can't use the IGP for the HTPC VM?  Although an HD4000 can't do everything without issue, it does a great job for most of my content, so I'd prefer to use that for one of the HTPC machines, if possible.  I have an ATI 5450 card which I'm currently using for the unRAID box, and don't think it will do a very good job for an HTPC, so I'd rather use them this way, it at all possible.

you might be able to get it working if you can get the right versions of everything working at the same time. I gave up on it as it looks like one of those bleeding edge solutions that is not remotely stable and that's too frustrating in an HTPC (which you just want to work).

 

To give some examples

 

This one is for HD4000 but is on xen 4.1.3 (xen 4.3 is current, 4.4 soon)

http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.pt/2012/10/howto-xen-413-windows-8-hvm-domu-with.html

 

This covers a patch that apparently gets HD4600 working, this is not in xen 4.3 but might be in 4.4

http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2013-07/msg00426.html

 

This one is for HD2500 but not sure which version of the stack

http://scnr.net/blog/index.php/archives/292

 

If you have the appetite for it then you may well get it working. I gave up and just threw hardware at the problem instead.

 

If you're just passing a 1080p encoded video to a 1080p display, this is generally true.  However, once you start scaling video (up or down) and deinterlacing, IVTC, smooth motion, etc, a cheap card just isn't going to cut it.  It's generally accepted that a 660 GeForce card or ATI 7xxx card is needed to handle madVR at the highest settings.  The HD4000 won't handle it all, but handles most of my content without issues that bother me.

for a trouble free life and the ability to get the best PQ you can then you need a discrete GPU for sure. It just depends on how far you are willing to compromise and/or how plug and play you want it to be.

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I am wondering about all this 64 bit talk as well. Is there somewhere that I can read up on wither or not I need or want this? I am probably going to have to upgrade my processor and my mono due to finally getting PLex installed so  I might as well get as much future proofing as I can. I probably just want to run the popular packages such as sick,couch,dropbox,plex,time machine,Apc and clean out unmenu.

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Having just gone through the hardware upgrade process I may be able to add some thoughts (which may or may not help).

 

I originally had a low end AMD proc/mb (actually I haven't updated my sig, so it's still there), but knowing that x64 was coming I wanted to get a better foundation to start leveraging virtualization. As the various threads progressed I also saw the potential of virtualizing at least some of my XBMC clients as I provide media to 4 TVs in the house currently.

 

Over the last month my goals have changed quite a bit, and have included vt-x, vt-d, hardware pass-through, etc, and I can definitely say that you want to make sure you have a clear vision of what you want before you invest in any hardware - I really didn't as my goals kept changing and it definitely cost me more than it should have.

 

I had started thinking about virtualizing UnRAID, but with the 6.0 beta out this seems like less of a requirement, however I still wanted to virtualize the various plugins (SAB, SB, CP, Plex, MySQL/XBMC), and I want to create virtualized XBMC sessions.

 

If virtualized XBMC is not of interest then you really only need hardware that will support vt-x, and potentially hyper-threading. I bought a i5-4570 on sale after Christmas, but realized it didn't do hyper-threading, so I returned it and decided to go for a Xeon i3 instead (which does anything/everything you can think of with virtualization). However... as my requirements changed, and I decided I wanted to virtualize XBMC I realized that the fact that the Xeon i3 does not have video capabilities would mean I needed a dedicated video card for the host, which reduces the number of XBMC clients I can support. Unfortunately I couldn't return the Xeon, but I ended up buying an i7-4770 that does everything - but it cost $330 (plus the $260 for the Xeon which I will use elsewhere).

 

I also had originally bought a SuperMicro X10SLH-F-O as it provided IPMI, but has limited expansion slots and requires ECC memory, which is expensive. I was going to settle with it, but on first power up it shot sparks 6-8 inches off the motherboard, so I returned it and ended up with an ASRock Z87 Extreme6 which supports all the virtualization options, plus lots of expansion slots (but no IPMI).

 

I've also changed my mind and decided not to install any of this hardware in my UnRAID server as I have 2 AOC-SAS2LP cards which would again limit my options for adding video cards for XBMC, so I am using an older i5-2500/ASUS P8H77 motherboard combo for UnRAID (where I can still virtualize my plugins), and am building a second XenServer server that will have multiple AMD 6450 video cards that I can pass-through for XBMC (stay away from Nvidia cards as you can't pass them through to VMs properly unless they are Quadro which are expensive).

 

Bottom line is I now have a beefier UnRAID server, and a second XenServer for XBMC, but also have an extra Xeon i3 and Nvidia GT610 card (which I tried before realizing you need AMD video cards for easy pass-through).

 

My other issue is that I decided to go for the latest and greatest proc/mb so settled on LGA1150, however there are very limited options for CPU for this chipset, and all the ones that support virtualization are expensive.

 

If I had better planned out what exactly I needed each computer to do I would have saved myself several hundred dollars and multiple trips/online orders for new hardware.

 

All these new options are exciting and it's easy to get sucked in without proper planning. Once you have a clear vision of your requirements though it's a lot easier to figure out what your budget needs to be and what you can realistically invest in.

 

The bottom line is that with UnRAID 6 you don't need to worry about vt-d / hardware pass-through unless you want to build XBMC VMs. Everything else will work with vt-x which opens your options quite a bit. Hyper-threading is also a benefit for virtualization (it provides better CPU utilization), but it's not 100% critical (it depends on your budget).

 

It's an exciting time for UnRAID users, but I wish I had waited a few weeks and mapped everything out before whipping out the credit card as I would have saved myself a lot of headaches (and questions from the wife).  :P

 

 

 

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