July 2, 201610 yr Hey guys, I've seen a few videos about unRAID in the past and it looks awesome for having 2 people on 1 PC, but I was looking for a lightweight OS that can be dedicated to hosting VMs (for me: windows, os x, kali linux) and having an easy way to switch between them whilst keeping the same hardware (and just pausing the other VMs). Is this something unRAID can do? I want my 980TI to be passed through to windows for gaming (which I'm also curious about - how well does gaming perform on unRAID?) so I don't mind having to buy another cheaper graphics card to run for linux and os x. My budget is flexible and if my current spec can't handle it I don't mind upgrading! i7 4790k 16gb DDR3 RAM 1TB SSD (just 1) 980TI GPU Thanks guys!
July 2, 201610 yr having an easy way to switch between them whilst keeping the same hardware (and just pausing the other VMs) Yes how well does gaming perform on unRAID? Very good! Some people have CPU performance problems on cpus with low ghz but they can be fixed by changing the unRAID/VM config. I don't mind having to buy another cheaper graphics card to run for linux and os x. You need a GPU for unraid (iGPU works as well) and of course the GPUs you want to pass through. Is this something unRAID can do? It should, but you should definitely download the trial before you buy unraid!
July 2, 201610 yr Author having an easy way to switch between them whilst keeping the same hardware (and just pausing the other VMs) Yes how well does gaming perform on unRAID? Very good! Some people have CPU performance problems on cpus with low ghz but they can be fixed by changing the unRAID/VM config. I don't mind having to buy another cheaper graphics card to run for linux and os x. You need a GPU for unraid (iGPU works as well) and of course the GPUs you want to pass through. Is this something unRAID can do? It should, but you should definitely download the trial before you buy unraid! Hey f3dora Thanks for the reply dude! When you say there's an easy way to switch them, how exactly does this work? If I have 1 keyboard, mouse, speakers, headset etc... is there a keyboard combo to pause the machine and be able to try the next? Also, do I need an individual GPU/wifi/etc for each machine or can I have the mac/linux VM just share the system and all of them share the wireless? Thanks for the help so far I'll give the demo a try tomorrow I think.
July 2, 201610 yr You can't pass the same devices to multiple VMs running at the same time. But, if you stop/shut down one VM, the devices that were passed through to that are now freed and you can start another VM and pass through those devices to it
July 2, 201610 yr Author You can't pass the same devices to multiple VMs running at the same time. But, if you stop/shut down one VM, the devices that were passed through to that are now freed and you can start another VM and pass through those devices to it What about pausing (i.e. suspending the VM as it is)? I'm looking for essentially a virtual KVM switch but the only VM that needs to be processing anything is the one on my screen.
July 2, 201610 yr You can't pass the same devices to multiple VMs running at the same time. But, if you stop/shut down one VM, the devices that were passed through to that are now freed and you can start another VM and pass through those devices to it What about pausing (i.e. suspending the VM as it is)? I'm looking for essentially a virtual KVM switch but the only VM that needs to be processing anything is the one on my screen. Not as far as I know. VM needs to be shut down to free the device to use in a different VM.
July 6, 20169 yr QEMU does allow a USB device to be detached from a running VM and attached to another running VM - but this is not exposed by unRAID. I use a plugin 'Libvirt Hotplug USB' to do this manually from the unRAID UI and works well. See http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=47240.0 It would be ideal if this could be automated somehow.
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