How much crazy it sounds to do real work with a VM?


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Hello guys,

 

I can't wait to get my new PC components and finally be able to put together my first unRAID build (in my signature). I've been reading a lot about unRAID, virtualisation, dockers, plugins and much more so I can get a clear picture of what is, how to use it and what I can expect from it.

 

Specially I've been reading a lot about the virtualisation side because I feel like having many devices for different things doesn't make too much sense anymore. For example, I currently have a QNAP NAS, a Mac mini with pfSense acting as a router, an iMac 27 to do work (graphic design), a raspberry with some home automation things, etc.

 

My plan is to build an unRAID build with all this in one, hence such a powerful CPU. The Windows VMs will be only for testing, not for "real" usage. My idea was to create an El Capitan's VM and work with it (I know I will need to get an external GPU as well, but that will come). Considering I can share a lot of cores with it plus I could passthrough a PCIe SSD only with it I think I can get almost bare-metal performance, or at least I will get waaaaay more performance than with my current iMac 27 late 2013

 

This won't be an immediate change, instead I will just start testing and finding out what things I will be able to get working perfectly, which ones won't and so on. My intention for this post was to just ask...

 

1. Is there anyone doing real work with a VM?

2. How's the stability of unRAID and the VM?

3. Any original OS X feature/capability/other that it won't be possible to use in a VM?

4. I'm not clear on how the array will work with the VM. If I passthrough a SSD disk to the VM... if I have to stop the array (or if it gets stop for some reason?) will my VM stop working too?

 

I will be very happy to read any other info/advice/suggestion you want to provide to learn more about this matter.

 

Thanks a lot!

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1. Is there anyone doing real work with a VM?

 

Yes I use it daily without any issues and do a lot of programming in Visual Studio. I'm a software engineer and I work from home half the week and half the week in the city office. I've never had any problems doing 'real work' as you say ;)

 

I'm currently on a hyper threaded 4 core xeon for testing purposes  (similar to my 2600k at stock speed). I have been running unraid 6.2 beta 21 as my daily driver for about a month now whilst I try out the unraid OS. Once I got gpu and usb controller passthrough working I found it excellent.

 

As for recreation, I play a lot of the Witcher 3 in dx 11 at >60fps on my R9 280x and ashes of the singularity in dx 12. Firestrike benchmarks show within 1-2% of base metal performance. The only thing I haven't actually benchmarked yet is ssd performance as it doesn't seem to play nice in a vm.

 

2. How's the stability of unRAID and the VM?

 

Stability has been fine for me. I'm planning to build a much more capable dual xeon 2670 build on unraid now as I have been very pleased with how it performs (and how stable it is).

 

3. Any original OS X feature/capability/other that it won't be possible to use in a VM?

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Sorry, I'm a windows user so can't speak to OSX.

 

4. I'm not clear on how the array will work with the VM. If I passthrough a SSD disk to the VM... if I have to stop the array (or if it gets stop for some reason?) will my VM stop working too?

Yes stopping the array will shutdown any virtual machines you have running.

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Not completely unraid specific, but...

 

Every user at my work place works inside a VM. None of the real work is ever done on a bare metal machine, other than setting up other VMs. All the normal users Citrix in to virtualized workstations where their work environment is properly configured and maintained.

 

Doing real work in VMs has been a real thing since 2008 here.

 

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