May 23, 201610 yr Hi everyone! So, I've built a new server (2x E5-2670, 64GB ECC DDR3, 6TB storage total) and thinking of using UnRAID to virtualize it. I've got a few questions that I tried to find answers to my questions first before posting to ask, but couldn't find a definitive answer. I wanted to use unRAID primarily as a NAS device to store various types of media - easy answer, not really questioning that part. I also wanted to start consolidating systems and just virtualize it all through something (unRAID, ESXi, Proxmox), but I wanted input on how to accomplish on what I'm trying to do. I'd like to create at least 2 or 3 other VMs that will be used as SteamOS box, OSX box, and maybe a few headless linux VMs. In order to do the above, would I: [*]Need 2 separate video cards? One for SteamOS and one for OSX? [*]Should I use separate SSDs for the OS drives? Can I use the main NAS storage for mass storage accessible by the VMs? [*]For the headless linux VMs can I use the main NAS storage for OS or get another drive for those OS's? I'm basically just trying to plan out how the drives will be mapped to the various VMs. Thanks!
May 23, 201610 yr Hi everyone! So, I've built a new server (2x E5-2670, 64GB ECC DDR3, 6TB storage total) and thinking of using UnRAID to virtualize it. I've got a few questions that I tried to find answers to my questions first before posting to ask, but couldn't find a definitive answer. I wanted to use unRAID primarily as a NAS device to store various types of media - easy answer, not really questioning that part. I also wanted to start consolidating systems and just virtualize it all through something (unRAID, ESXi, Proxmox), but I wanted input on how to accomplish on what I'm trying to do. I'd like to create at least 2 or 3 other VMs that will be used as SteamOS box, OSX box, and maybe a few headless linux VMs. In order to do the above, would I: [*]Need 2 separate video cards? One for SteamOS and one for OSX? [*]Should I use separate SSDs for the OS drives? Can I use the main NAS storage for mass storage accessible by the VMs? [*]For the headless linux VMs can I use the main NAS storage for OS or get another drive for those OS's? I'm basically just trying to plan out how the drives will be mapped to the various VMs. Thanks! You need graphics cards for the VMs that you want to connect to physical displays. Without a gpu, you can still do remote desktop or vnc to access their guis. If you want to have osx and steam os to display on external displays at the same time, then you will need two graphics cards. I have two VMs that I switch between so I only have one gpu. The only thing is, I have to shut down one to use the other. You can probably also create two xmls for each one, one with gpus and one without. So when you have one hooked up to the display, the other one can run without the display and just through remote desktop. The VMs by default use virtual disks (single image file). Most of us have cache drives or cache pools that host the image files and the docker containers. If you have ssds in a cache pool, no need to have separate disks for each vm. Most of the time you won't notice slow downs because the ssd is unlikely to become the bottleneck (unless multiple vms are running high disk intensive processes at the same time) On Windows and OSX VMs, nas storage will be available through smb or nfs, etc. and you can easily use it for mass storage. On linux you can even mount your shares (through 9p) so they'll look like a part of your system .
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