Hello all,

 

I plan on building a new content creation pc and came across unRaid while watching a video on Linus Tech Tips. I'd like to build a machine that can take advantage of my hardware to the fullest.

 

Some points I'd like to bring up before getting into the details:

 

• I have a Synology NAS at my home. I have used Oracle's Virtual Box in the past and the virtual hard drives it made we very easy to backup to the server. With unRAID, will it be easy to make full backups of my various Virtual Machines? Will this require shutting the machine down or can I do snapshots to my NAS?
  
• Since I have a NAS at home, I was going for relatively limited storage for this machine. What I want to achieve is the SSD for the cache as well as the 2 hard drives for VM storage and of course the remaining drive as a parity drive for the two drives. From what I've read this should get me the minimum I need to achieve this, correct?
  
• How easy is it to turn on/off VMs? Can resources between VMs be allocated pretty quickly, even if it requires a restart? For instance, I'm planning on running at least 3 video cards, with at least one of them being major. Say I'm working on VM #1 with Adobe and have 4 of 6 cores allocated to it, and 2 to a Media Center PC. I'm done working on VM #1, so I want to give the beefy video card to the Media Center and give it 3 extra cores. Will this be a somewhat easy process? 
  

 

 

Now on to my actual build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Zachaol/saved/#view=mvCYcf

 

• Regarding GPUs: I will need one for each VM and one for unRAID correct? I just have one in there for my primary VM which will be my Adobe Content Creation Rig. I will probably use just an old Video card for unRAID itself as this CPU doesn't support onboard video, and will probably use an another semi-old card for the Media Center until I know my unRAID plan will work.
  
• Regarding Networking: If I got the PCI-e network card listed, could I assign a wired connection to each VM?
  

 

Thanks for the asssistance!

I can somewhat answer your questions, however I'm sure there will be some things that I can't fully answer.

 

Backing up the VMs: I had a few VMs and dockers that were on a cache drive recently. I needed to upgrade that cache drive. I essentially copied all VM and docker images (inluding permissions) to the array. I replaced the drive, added as a cache, recreated the shares that were on the cache that I removed and then copied the files back on to the cache drive. Everything worked as normal without anything special needing to be done.

 

Using an SSD for the VMs helps out a lot on speed. You are correct with the parity drive. You can use just one parity and one storage device. The parity must be equal to or larger than any disk in the protected array.

 

It is super easy to turn a VM off, simply use shutdown within the VM and it will power down. If you have problems, you can always force shutdown. I believe you have to power down the VM that is using the hardware you want to utilize when switching and also power down the VM you want to reallocate the hardware too and assign it in the settings (very quick and easy to do).

 

The baord I'm using has onboard GPU, so that works for my console. If you want to output to a different monitor then you will need a GPU for each monitor you want to use, from what I understand. You can always control the VMs through QUEMU/VNC over the network without any additional network cards. This obviously wouldn't be a good option if you wanted to use it for gaming or anything that needed decent response times.

 

As far as wired connection, the best is to use a virtually bridged connection that can be set up in unraid. You can pass through NICs, but I do not think that is natively supported in unraid yet. I read somewhere that it may be built in unraid in the next major release (ie, 7.x).

 

Hopefully that gives you some information to mull over.

Alright, all good information. Howerver even if I have a beefy card that supports it, I still need a GPU for each monitor? So I can't have two VMs, each with dual monitors, and only have three GPUs(One for each VM + one for unRAID)?

 

If so that totally destroys my plan as my PCs all have dual monitor setups now and I can't live without that. I still run games in a single monitor, but I always have some other program open in the second monitor.