I haven't been following UnRaid for a while so I'm not really familiar with the improvements of 6, even after doing some reading. I have an ASRock z87 extreme11/ac with about 15 drives or so.

 

I know a lot of it depends on the hardware but what are my options as far as having Windows and UnRaid running side by side. I used to have one machine dedicated to UnRaid and another for everything else to include gaming. Am I able to have both systems running side by side on the same machine, while still giving Windows direct access to peripherals such as the GPU? With previous version I know it was possible to install UnRaid in a VM in Windows but that's less than ideal. Assuming hardware compatibility isn't an issue, what are my options?

 

Edit: another question. Can I visualize or use my existing Windows boot drive or would I need a new installation of Windows?

unRAID 6 ships with the KVM Hypervisor (as you've found via this forum).  That means that you can run unRAID as the host OS, but you can run other OS's as guests in virtual machines (VMs).  This is native functionality in unRAID 6.x and many people are using it to run Windows.

 

The key question you need to answer is, do you want to sit in front of your unRAID machine and use it to run Windows and play games?  The lightweight VM solution involves accessing your VM via Remote Desktop from another machine, but this is slow and only suitable for non-graphics intensive applications.  There's a high performance sit-in-front-of-the machine option, though - but it involves having the correct hardware.  If your CPU and motherboard support VT-d and you have a compatible graphics card, you can "pass-through" the graphics card into the VM and run full speed.