I've been using unRAID for many years almost exclusively for media storage for Kodi.  I'm already very familiar with VM's, especially Hyper-V and to a lesser extent VMWare.  I'm a complete noob when it comes to anything linux (unraid is it for me). 

 

I frequently need to spin up a VM to work through various issues or for testing / debugging purposes.  The VM's could just about any Windows version (server or workstation) from 2008R2 or later and I generally connect to them via RDP or the hyper-v console.  Today I run these on my Win10 laptop.  I'm considering replacing my laptop with something that would not have the horsepower to do this and looking for alternatives when i thought of unRAID.

 

How well do VM's work in unRAID?  Are they difficult to setup and/or connect to?

 

Since this was never a consideration for me before I know I'd need to upgrade my CPU/MB/RAM to accommodate multiple VM's.  Any recommendations on new hardware would be much appreciated.  My plan would be to use the secondary server in my sig.

 

The issue you are going to run into wanting to setup VM's on your hardware is resources, or lack thereof. When you setup a VM you need to dedicate CPU cores and memory, as well as disk space. Your secondary server is a Celeron with a single core, just enough CPU to run unRAID, there is no room to run a VM on this hardware. Your primary server has an older Core 2 Duo CPU but only 4GB of RAM, barely enough to run a single VM, but you might be able to get away with it, it really depends what else you are doing with unRAID on this server. Ideally you want to have at least a quad core CPU and 8GB of RAM if you want to start setting up VM's, this gives you enough cores (at least 2) and memory (2-4GB) that you can dedicate to it. Also, its advisable, for optimal performance to dedicate your VM to its own SSD.