Thinking of moving my gaming PC into a VM on my server

[Laucien]

Hi!,

 

Some time ago I put together an unRAID server for my apartment and since working on it I've been pretty tempted to ditch my gaming desktop and move everything into the server itself since the case should be able to accommodate pretty much everything I need. Got a couple doubts though and was wondering if anyone could help me out.

 

I would be taking the best parts from the gaming desktop and moving them into the server so the end result is probably going to be totally overkill for both purposes heh.

 

It's a Skylake platform. The CPU would be a 6700k on a Z170 ASUS MAXIMUS VIII Gene motherboard.

• Is it possible/easy to pass the onboard sound card to the VM? I have a discrete sound card but it would be the only one thing I wouldn't manage to fit into the merged build so that's kind of a dealbreaker. Preferably I'd rather not use the discrete GPU's audio through DP/HDMI as I have both speakers and analog headphones.
  
• I'd like to pass as many USB ports to the VM as possibe (to avoid having to reboot when pluging anything new). That has to be done on a per-controller basis assigning all the ports for that controller or none, right? I think the ASUS board has 2
  

 

Right now my server has 1SSD as cache + 5 HDDs for data. That's all 6 native SATA ports on the motherboard and ideally I'd need two more to move the drives in my desktop into my server and pass those to the VM.

• Can I use a random PCI-to-SATA card to add the ports I need? Something like this one from Amazon.
  

 

And lately. I'm going to be moving my GTX 1080 and pass it through to the VM. I'm assuming that would behave exactly as it normally would, right? performance and features like G-Sync.

 

 

I'm sure I'll have a ton more questions but those are the ones I can think of right now haha.

 

Thanks! .

[De1taE1even]

Is it possible/easy to pass the onboard sound card to the VM? I have a discrete sound card but it would be the only one thing I wouldn't manage to fit into the merged build so that's kind of a dealbreaker. Preferably I'd rather not use the discrete GPU's audio through DP/HDMI as I have both speakers and analog headphones.

 

Forwarding the onboard audio device to the VM shouldn't be an issue.  My mobo has 2 sound devices, the one on the mobo itself, and the one supplied by the cpu.  I also have an audio device from my GTX1070 (the one you said you didn't want to use).  All 3 are available to forward to the VM.  I never tried the intel one from my cpu, but I've gone back and forth between the Intel 9 series device and the GTX1070 audio controller, and both worked.

 

 

I'd like to pass as many USB ports to the VM as possibe (to avoid having to reboot when pluging anything new). That has to be done on a per-controller basis assigning all the ports for that controller or none, right? I think the ASUS board has 2

Yep, as long as you have a second USB controller that your unRAID USB isn't using, you should be able to forward that bus to the VM.  The newer versions of unRAID have made that even easier as well.  If you look at the above screenshot, you'll see that my USB bus is selectable to forward to the VM.

 

Can I use a random PCI-to-SATA card to add the ports I need?

Nothing wrong with using a PCIe SATA controller, but I'd make sure it's a chip that has been known to be compatible.  Check the lime-tech wiki for compatible devices.  I have personally never passed through an entire SATA bus to a VM, but I know others have.  If the PCIe slot and your SATA controller share the same bus (they sometimes do), you might have trouble getting this going, but I don't have much experience here, so someone else could chime in for a definitive answer.

 

I'm going to be moving my GTX 1080 and pass it through to the VM. I'm assuming that would behave exactly as it normally would, right? performance and features like G-Sync.

Yep, you should have no trouble here.  I've had no issues with my 1070.