Advice on unRAID 6 setup

[Fatal_Flaw]

I'm currently running unRAID 5.0.6 on some old desktop hardware. It's got 10 data + parity drives.

 

I got my hands on a Dell Precision 3600. It's 6 years old, but with a Xeon W3520 and 24GB of RAM, it's significantly more powerful than my current unRAID hardware. I want to take advantage of that extra power and the visualization support in v6. I'm using an old laptop with an external hard drive (4tb USB3) for extra space as a file sharing box. I just access it through remote desktop from my main work station. I want to run Windows in a VM on my unRAID box as a replacement for that old laptop.

 

I have significant experience with ESXi/vSphere, but I've never used Xen or KVM.

 

Questions:

 

Are there any reasons to choose one over the other (KVM vs Xen)?

 

Will that 4TB USB3 NTFS formatted external drive be accessible in the Windows VM? I don't want the VM constantly reading/writing to the array.

 

Is it possible to store VMs on an SSD outside of the unRAID protected array?

 

Are there any issues with connecting to a VPN from a Windows VM? I use the Private Internet Access service.

 

Can you think of any other issues or concerns with this setup?

 

Thanks!