This hardware good enough for unraid + Windows VM?

[TyantA]

Toying with options here.

 

I have an old Asus M2A-VM board with an Athlon X2 5000+ processor, 4GB of ram that I'd like to throw in an unraid box and run a Windows 10 VM on.

 

• Unraid config will likely be pretty basic. Running Plex, maybe OwnCloud, not much else.
  
• Windows would be used as a browsing machine / document editing.
  

 

If this hardware can pull that off decently enough, it would save me building two separate boxes.

 

Thoughts?

[garycase]

That processor only scores 1319 on PassMark, so it would not be able to run Plex if you need any transcoding -- a native stream would work okay, but the rule of thumb is you need 2000 Passmarks/stream for glitch-free transcoding.    Not an absolute, but it's certainly a good idea to have enough "horsepower" to have nice clean streams.

 

As for running a VM,  the X2 5000+ was made in two different socket configurations, and only the AM2 version had hardware virtualization support => since your board is an AM2 board you should have the requisite AMD-V support.    So you should be able to run a VM with no problem, but the performance will be pretty slow with that CPU.    And I'd certainly not try to run the VM at the same time you're streaming a Plex stream.

 

[Aderalia]

From my experience you will run into some problems. unRAID itself should run without a problem, but as garycase already pointet out transcoding will be a problem. Also: Windows 10 uses LOTS of system resources, if you are planning on using Remote Desktop (in case your not using the VM straight from the Server itself) you´ll be lucky to get under 1 sec response time...

4 GB of RAM will just barely be enough to run a webbrowser in win 10

[TyantA]

Hrm. Thanks for the feedback and rule of thumb re: processor performance.

 

The unraid setup is a friend's. It currently has an old Athlon 1700+ in it with 768MB ram that has been doing basic unraid 5.x file sharing chores just fine but I'm trying to get him to do more with the box by moving to 6, etc. (Haven't even moved my system to 6 yet though). He had this hardware kicking around so I thought it would be a decent upgrade. In the end, he needs a system to browse on / place orders for his business and then unraid as a media server.

 

I guess in theory I can try the 5000+ with Windows 7 in a VM to save a bit on resources. His primary endpoint (right now at least) is an HTPC so everything should be played natively for the most part. I don't think he's thinking of using the VM remotely. It's mostly for when he's physically there, putting together packing lists etc. If I don't mention the possibility of remote access, it may not occur to him.

 

It's either that or I build two boxes but the hardware for the 2nd box is even less powerful: 3800+ so I'd have to decide which box is better suited to which processor. Kinda liked the idea of doing it all from one.

 

Ahh the joys of dabbling with old hardware.

 

 

[garycase]

The X2 5000+ will run Windows 10 ... but the performance will certainly be less than you'd like.    And if you do it with a VM instead of natively it will be even slower.    But for very basic tasks it may be okay for what you need.

 

Note, however, the UnRAID v6 is notably more CPU intensive than previous versions.    A basic UnRAID NAS runs just fine on older hardware with v5, but can "feel" a bit slow on v6.    Running this with Plex and a VM will definitely be pushing this old CPU ... but it SHOULD work okay as long as there's no transcoding needed.    Your friend is likely to have a bit of "stuttering" in any active Plex stream if he's using the W10 VM at the same time; but it certainly won't hurt to just set it up and see what you think about the performance.