Hi everyone!

 

I sent an email to limetech but was guided here to post.

 

A friend of mine runs wmware server and he wanted to dual boot his server with windows also to make it a gaming rigg too. But he wouldn't be able to run them at the same time means his server is going to be offline while his gaming.

 

I know limetech can run two os at the same time and play video games at the same time like linustechtips showed but my question is will this work like this instead?

 

Have limetech run both windows and a wmware server at the same time on the same machine or that's not possible?

 

 

Thanks with kind Regards

Elvir

Your subject says dualboot but it's not clear if that is what you are actually talking about in your post.

 

If you boot up another operating system and allow it to write to any of the unRAID array disks, you will invalidate parity and have to rebuild it every time you boot up unRAID. Sort defeats the purpose of having unRAID fault tolerance.

 

You can boot up unRAID and run virtual machines under unRAID, such as Windows, but I don't see why you would want to run VMware under unRAID since the point of VMware is to run virtuals, which unRAID can already do.

 

There have been some people who have run unRAID as a virtual under some other operating system. See the Virtualizing unRAID subforum.

 

 

the thing is vmware dosent support vt-d for nvidias gpu so he wouldent be able to run windows as gaming rigg

what you are requesting probably is gpu passtrough - giving a vm a GPU that will perform like one that is not in a vm.

 

That way you could run another OS paralel to your windows gaming machine. If you want to run Vmware stuff, and your PC is powerful enough to be a host to multiple machines at once, i'd recomend considering vmware esxi. There is a free version of it available and there are folks in this forum who run unraid and esxi on the same machine.

 

There are some things you will need though.

 

1. your cpu needs to have vt-d

2. your motherboard needs to comply with vt-d (you often will not even find info about it in the manual)

3. your gpu that you want to give to the gaming vm, needs to be in a seprate IOMMU Group. Only then can you give it to a vm.

nice to haves:

4. your gpu should have UEFI boot capability

5. your mainboard should be able to UEFI boot from USB

 

you might also want to drop the vmware part alltogether, as unraid can do most of the stuff you would get on a free vmware licence anyway. The server grade stuff like fallback etc is not available, but most thats out of question anyway.

 

I droped the use of vmware completely and all my PC operating systems in my home are virtualized except for one laptop. That is multiple gaming VMs running on the same server.

 

To get better help, you do need to clarify what you want to do, and what hardware you have. Maybe checkout the unraid videos about what is possible.