CPU Core Allocation

[ucliker]

So I have done searches upon searches and I have yet to find a concrete answer.

 

My CPU is an E5-2670v3 it has 12 cores 24 threads. I want to setup 5 dockers and have 1 VM for Windows 10. How many cores should I leave for UnRaid to run properly and stable. One of the dockers is Plex and I have 2 trans-coding streams max. The rest I want to allocate towards the Windows VM since I am developer and design student and use a lot of programs at once. Ram is easy since I have 64 GB I can just leave 8-16 GB or so for unRAID.

 

Thanks in advance I'm pretty happy that I will have my NAS and main PC in one box finally.

 

[ashman70]

I would start out by allocating two cores to you Windows VM, after that if you find you are maxing out those two cores, feel free to add two more. Is always better to start with less then add more and scale up as you need, then to start with too much as too much can actually hurt performance.

[ucliker]

I would start out by allocating two cores to you Windows VM, after that if you find you are maxing out those two cores, feel free to add two more. Is always better to start with less then add more and scale up as you need, then to start with too much as too much can actually hurt performance.

 

Thanks for the fast reply. I just assumed the more cores the better just like on most PC builds I have done. Well that's really good to know, maybe I can add an OS X VM also now that Ill have extras cores.

 

Is there a minimum number of cores that unRAID needs to run properly with 5 dockers?

[ashman70]

If you are doing two transcoding streams, I would want to allocate probably two cores to each stream and have at least two cores available for UnRaid.

[BRiT]

You will also want to look at threadsiblings to make sure you dont split the assignments of the hyperthreaded cores between aplications.

 

Unraid 6.2.x shows thread siblings in the main dashboard page. If you dont have hyperthreading then it willnonly be 1 core per line. If you do have hyperthreading it will show the real and hypervisor cores on the same line.

 

In a 12 core 24 thread cpu, this typically means core thread 0 is paired with core thread 12.

[NotYetRated]

I have 16 cores/32 threads with a ton of dockers and 5 VM's.

 

-I allocate 2 cores to each Windows VM

-I lock my Plex docker down to 10 cores(ive been switching it a bit lately), but mainly i dont allow it free access to all cores as I dont ever want transcoding a shit ton of media to get in the way of all of my other stuff running 100%.

 

How I have my cores set, I actually only have 2 threads which don't have anything else(VM/Docker) assigned to them. This way, unRaid always has 2 threads all to itself.

 

I have a few "misc" cores which I have multiple dockers assigned to.

 

Couldn't tell you if this is the most optimal or correct way to do things, but its been working exceptionally for me. My current windows VMs are only media players and light gamers, most streaming stuff from my Steam on my gaming rig.

 

My current core assignment is attached.

[ucliker]

Thanks everyone for all your help. This is can be a pain but in the end it's so worth it. I may end up building another separate box just for unRAID since I'm only running it for backups, Plex and possibly VM's depending on how well the VM's perform with Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamwiever and Illustrator running at the same time. I usually run them all with no issues on this system but never virtualized.