December 1, 20169 yr My current desktop has an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard with an Intel Core i7-920 2.67 GHz, 6 GB SDRAM DDR3 1600, and 6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports. I am currently running windows, but I am interested in making this an unRAID server and run Windows in a virtual machine. Is this a good setup and something that is reasonable to try? Any advice or comments? Thanks!
December 1, 20169 yr A Core i7-920 can make a decent unRAID server but you'd be limited to what you can do with VMs with that setup. Neither the motherboard or CPU support VT-d so you can't do any hardware passthrough. And 6GB isn't a lot - unRAID probably needs two and the VM emulation layer needs a chunk too - maybe another gig? So you'd only have 2-3 GB for the Windows VM and you'd be accessing it via RDP. That might be Ok if you have windows program you want to run in the background, but I wouldn't be satisfied with that for regular interactive use. People try VMs with even fewer resources, though, so you could give it a try...
December 1, 20169 yr Author Thanks for the reply, that's great information. It seems it'd be relatively inexpensive to add an additional 12 Gb of RAM, making 18 GB total, which should help. Do you think I'd just be better off building a cheaper box for unRAID in addition to having my desktop? It would be nice to have them combined, though.
December 2, 20169 yr More memory would help but it doesn't get you past the hardware pass-through issue. I assume (could be incorrect, dunno) that when you refer to a combined setup that you'd want to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor hooked up to your server, connected to a decent graphics card, possibly using audio, DVD, etc., all within a Windows session while unRAID runs silently in the background. In order to do that you need to "pass" the USB controller and GPU, etc. into unRAID via VT-d or hardware pass-through. Your current system just isn't capable of that. What you want to do is possible, but the people who are doing it are using much more modern motherboards and CPUs. You might want to browse the VM Engine forum for ideas. I run a dedicated unRAID server - it sits in a closet and runs headless, that works well for me.
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