Please help me decide move to unRAID!

[RCPMAD]

Hello Ladies and Gents,

 

So I am finally at a point where I need to toggle between multiple systems at the same time and keep them completely isolated. I game and do a lot of forensic research under Linux and after some research I have come across unRAID. From everything so far it seems too good to be true and for the licence price it is even better but I do have a lot of questions that I have not found anything very specific.

 

Here are my specs which should make answering my questions much easier I hope...

 

Asus X99-E WS

Intel i7 5960X

64GB RAM DDR4

128GB Samsung SM951 M.2 NVMe

1.2TB Intel 750 Series PCIE NVMe

1.2TB Intel 750 Series PCIE NVMe

2 x PASCAL (SLI) OR POLARIS (CROSSFIRE) PCIE GPUS

 

Here are my questions and I hope you can answer me. It will most likely determine if I will buy unRAID or not.

 

1. Will I be able to fully utilize the performance of the above hardware? How good is the driver support for new hardware? Now I know there will be some minimal performance loss due to the VM's running on a headless hyper visor.

2. Will I be able to pass-through more than 1 GPU to per VM and run them in SLI or CROSSFIRE?

3. Will I be able to pass-through the NVMe PCIE SSD's to 1 VM and configure them in software RAID 0, Windows 10 Storage Pools.

4. Will I be able to pass-through the integrated audio card to the VM?

5. Will I be able to pass-through only USB controllers or just individual USB ports?

6. Will I be able to pass-through NIC ports to a VM?

7. Will unRAID support VM snapshots features at some point in the future?

8. Does unRAID create a physical file on the disk for the memory of each running VM?

9. Do I need a dedicated GPU or iGPU for the unRAID? Can't i just manage everything through SSH or the web interface and assign my GPU's for my gaming VM?

10. What are unRAID's actual spec requirements for the hyper visor. If I have an 4 core CPU and 8GB RAM do I need to leave 1 core and 1GB RAM unassigned for unRAID or will it intelligently handle the processing like ESXi does it for both memory and processing?

11. Will you add UEFI support? I tried running unRAID 6 from a USB 3 drive in a USB 3 port and it did not work. I had to use a USB 2 drive in the USB 3 port for it to work.

12. Can I just do the following...

Linux - SSH

64GB Virtual Disk - Stored on the 128GB Samsung SM951 M.2 NVMe - 32GB RAM - 16 Cores - iNetwork Pass-Through

Windows - Monitor/Mouse/Keyboard

64GB Virtual Disk - Stored on the 128GB Samsung SM951 M.2 NVMe - 32GB RAM - 16 Cores - 2 x PCIE SSD INTEL 750 Pass-Through - 2 x PCIE GPU PASCAL (SLI) or POLARIS (CROSSFIRE) Pass-Through - iAudio & iNetwork Pass-Through

 

Many thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

[RCPMAD]

Shameless bump...

[RCPMAD]

Uhh... nobody?

[RobJ]

Give them time!    That's a lot of questions and some of them are quite broad, some are going to be hard to answer.  KVM is new, a work in progress, doesn't have the years and knowledge base behind it that VMware, ESXi, etc have.  (And having 2 number 9's probably confused them!  )

 

I suspect many saw the long list of tougher questions, and decided they would leave it to someone else with more time.

[Aderalia]

Hey

I cant give you all the answers (im still new myself) however a youtuber calles Linus made some videos about the virtualisation potential of unraid. (His channel is called LinusTechTips, i think the videos are called 2 Gamers one PC and the newer 7 Gamers one PC.

 

What i can tell you is this (i use your Question numbers):

1. Your performance loss will be pretty small, so you dont have to worry about that

2. Multi GPU should work, since unraid just patches them through. (not sure about that)

3. As far as i know you have to use a share from your aray as storage for your VMs, so if you create a share with you NVMe drives (i love those btw) they have the capacity but most likely not the speed raid 0 would provide. Maybe you can raid up two share that are only made of 1 drive however ive never worked with PCIe SSDs in unRAID...

5. as far a i know you can pass Devices, not the ports, however im not sure about that either.

6. NIC Port should work perfectly

9. as far as i know you need one sort of GPU for unraid, my first system uesed the one build into my CPU.

11. Ive seen a request for that in the feature request section of this forum, dont know more than that

 

 

Thats pretty much all i know, most of it isnt even usefull

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ashman70]

Your questions sound like you are coming from using Esxi and looking for the same sort of experience, you won't find it, UnRaid and Esxi are very different products. For one, Esxi is meant for the corporate IT world, UnRaid is not. KVM does not currently support snapshots or virtual networking in anyway near the same level that Esxi does and I don't know that it ever will.

 

In answer to your questions from what I know:

 

1.Performance will be good, support for new hardware is limited to what works, if you want to use a new 10GB network card and there is no driver for it, its up to Lime-Tech's devs to create a driver for it.

2.I don' believe crossfire or SLI are currently supported, not sure if its coming in 6.2

3.I don't know.

4.Yes as long as its supported.

5.I believe this is coming in 6.2

6.If you mean individual nic ports on a quad network card, I am not sure.

7.This has been requested, not sure what is happening with it.

8.I don't know.

9.Unraid itself does not require a GPU, you can run it headless and manage it through the web gui or ssh.

10.The more hardware the better for KVM, minimum would be say a dual core i3 that supports VT-D and ioMMU

11.Not sure if this is coming in 6.2

12.Not sure.

 

Good luck.

[RCPMAD]

@Aderalia & @ashman70 - Many thanks for the answers. I really appreciate it.

 

@Aderalia - I know Linus as I watch his videos quite often so I have seen that video. It is one of the main reason I have come across unRAID. He does not cover much in his video about the hyper visor, I don't think he even mentioned it once.

 

@ashman70 - Yes I use ESXi to manage a forensic lab in my workplace and got used to it so it is probably one of the reason why I like some of their features. The biggest gripe I had with ESXi for my personal use was that the free version allows only up to 8 core per VMs and NVIDIA GPUs are not supported on purpose for pass-through, I know this is NVIDIA gimping the cards.

 

Price for unRAID is also very attractive for personal use compared to ESXi.

[RCPMAD]

This is a bit of a shameless bump but I was wondering if anyone can answer some of the remaining questions.

[vl1969]

I have a question back, for all your needs why not loook into xen or xen server. It is more closer to esxi.

Unraid is more of a NAS setup with some extra capabilities. It is good but still more NAS than a vm hypervisor.

 

Sent from my phone

 

 

[aptalca]

You might want to ping Jonp as he works for lime-tech and he is leading the hypervisor developments. He is also known to have crazy setups in his lab and he helped linus set up the multi user gaming system used in that video

[bluepr0]

Hey!

 

I’m absolutely new to unRAID… actually I haven’t build my rig yet as I’m waiting for components to arrive, however I’ve been researching a lot because I’m thinking about use it as my NAS (with a few VMs + dockers and more) but also have an OS X VM to work there

 

I will try to reply to the questions I know

 

1. It seems that for CPU you will mostly get bare-metal performance. For GPU I’ve read different cases where users were having for example good FPS on their Windows VMs but not as good as bare-metal, so this might depend on your GPU, MB, etc. For SSD you can either have a vidks on your cache pool (seems to have not so good performance) or alternatively you can passthrough the entire controller (for example the PCI controller for each Intel 750) which seems to get almost bare-metal performance

 

2. I guess you can passthrough more than one GPU but not sure if you then can make it work in SLI/Crossfire

 

3. It seems you can

 

4. Yep

 

5. You can do both

 

6. Not sure about this one, but I guess you can’t… only passthrough the whole controller. In any case, depending on the usage you may want to lose a bit of bare-metal performance in favour of reduced network usage (passthrough NIC will be limited to its physical speed while using the virtual ones you can get higher speeds inside your unRAID box)

 

7. I guess only @jonp can answer that. If you use vdisk it seems easier to backup them in an incremental way.

 

8. No idea

 

9. AFAIK you will need a dedicated graphic card for unRAID only if you do passthrough to a VM and of course you only have one GPU

 

10. I guess requirements are on the LT website, about the other question for what I read it seems LT recommends to leave one core for unRAID

 

11. No idea

 

12. I think you can do almost that, but leaving 1 core for unRAID and a bit of RAM too.

[RCPMAD]

Many thanks guys, this is really appreciated and I know the questions are kind of complicated.

 

The last thing I want to know an answer is this question...

 

Does unRAID create a physical file on the disk for the memory of each running VM?

 

If it does not save memory on the disk while the VM's are running then you have me as a client.

 

Many thanks again to everyone that helped answer my questions.

[tdallen]

Are you referring to a swap file?  By default unRAID runs from a RAM disk and doesn't create/use a persisted swap file - though it can be configured to do so by an advanced user. 

 

Or something like a RAM live snapshot or VMWare Snapshot?  I don't think snapshots are supported and generally isn't needed under unRAID.

 

Of course the guest OS in a VM could choose to do so (Windows hibernate, for instance).

[aptalca]

Many thanks guys, this is really appreciated and I know the questions are kind of complicated.

 

The last thing I want to know an answer is this question...

 

Does unRAID create a physical file on the disk for the memory of each running VM?

 

If it does not save memory on the disk while the VM's are running then you have me as a client.

 

Many thanks again to everyone that helped answer my questions.

VM ram is not saved on the disk. They share the system memory. Every time you launch a vm, the vm will tie up however much ram you dedicate to it.

 

For instance, let's say you have a total of 64GB of ram and you want a specific vm to use 4GB. Once you launch that vm, there will be 60GB of ram available to the rest of the system. When you shut the vm down the 4GB ram is released back to the system.

[JonathanM]

VM ram is not saved on the disk. They share the system memory. Every time you launch a vm, the vm will tie up however much ram you dedicate to it.

Plus some overhead that KVM uses to emulate devices for the VM, I've seen examples of a gig or so. Don't allocate 6GB of RAM each to a couple simultaneously running VM's if you only have 16GB of RAM.

[jonp]

Many thanks guys, this is really appreciated and I know the questions are kind of complicated.

 

The last thing I want to know an answer is this question...

 

Does unRAID create a physical file on the disk for the memory of each running VM?

 

No, it does not.  Memory allocated to VMs is directly from system RAM.  The amount of RAM you need to have in your system per VM is the amount you are assigning plus a 20-25% overhead reserve for the emulated components.  The exact amount of overhead you need to have available is an undecidable problem to solve, as it can range based on the use of the guest and the amount of total system memory you are reserving for the VM(s) you have.

 

As others have mentioned, we are not a competitor to ESXi or any of the other mainstream traditional hypervisors.  They are designed to be SOLELY a virtualization host, focused entirely on the enterprise/cloud market, and are not user friendly.  So there are many of the more traditional hypervisor features that we haven't built in just yet (like snapshotting) because while we want to do that, there are lots of nuances to doing that right when you support multiple filesystems and NAS functionality on top of the virtualization host capabilities.  These are things that will come in due time.  Same goes for vlan support.

 

I also highly recommend leveraging the completely free trial to evaluate the software for yourself.  All questions relating to performance are pointless because everyone's hardware and network is different.  It's far easier to try it yourself for free than for anyone here to guess at what your experience might be unless you are coming to the table with a replica infrastructure to another user.  Keep in mind, this isn't me saying, "don't ask the question," but it is me saying, "don't trust anyone's answer until you test it for yourself."

 

Hope this sheds some light on things.

[RCPMAD]

Many thanks guys, this is really appreciated and I know the questions are kind of complicated.

 

The last thing I want to know an answer is this question...

 

Does unRAID create a physical file on the disk for the memory of each running VM?

 

No, it does not.  Memory allocated to VMs is directly from system RAM.  The amount of RAM you need to have in your system per VM is the amount you are assigning plus a 20-25% overhead reserve for the emulated components.  The exact amount of overhead you need to have available is an undecidable problem to solve, as it can range based on the use of the guest and the amount of total system memory you are reserving for the VM(s) you have.

 

As others have mentioned, we are not a competitor to ESXi or any of the other mainstream traditional hypervisors.  They are designed to be SOLELY a virtualization host, focused entirely on the enterprise/cloud market, and are not user friendly.  So there are many of the more traditional hypervisor features that we haven't built in just yet (like snapshotting) because while we want to do that, there are lots of nuances to doing that right when you support multiple filesystems and NAS functionality on top of the virtualization host capabilities.  These are things that will come in due time.  Same goes for vlan support.

 

I also highly recommend leveraging the completely free trial to evaluate the software for yourself.  All questions relating to performance are pointless because everyone's hardware and network is different.  It's far easier to try it yourself for free than for anyone here to guess at what your experience might be unless you are coming to the table with a replica infrastructure to another user.  Keep in mind, this isn't me saying, "don't ask the question," but it is me saying, "don't trust anyone's answer until you test it for yourself."

 

Hope this sheds some light on things.

 

Hi Jon, many thanks for your reply. Once my GPU arrives this week I will give the trial version a go.