SOLVED - Should I upgrade RAM/8GB RAM per Windows 10 VM?

[DZMM]

I've just picked up another GPU and monitor to make a 3rd VM.  All VMs will be on 100% to make it easy for family to access.  My current memory usage with dockers and 2 VMs (4 cores and 8GB each) is pretty much always at my full 32GB, although some of this is cached.

 

If I buy another 32GB and create another 8GB VM will my usage jump to around 42gb (assuming around 2gb overhead on the VM), or will unraid benefit from the extra 20gb (main dockers are Plex, donate, CP, headphones) ??

 

I'm worried about spending £150-200 on ram and potentially wasting it, and wondering if better off halving the two more casual VMs to 4gb each?

 

Is there anything I can do to use the ram e.g. move Plex transcoding to ram?  Is this beneficial??

 

Or, is 4gb pushing it for a w10 VM and will I just be opening myself up to wife and kids moaning about lag and speed?  That's probably worth the extra spend!!!

[m.b.d]

I've found win10 manages RAM much better than 7 and 8.  4GB should be ample ram for a system not being asked to render video or compress large files.  If they are using it to normal work (no heavy 3d gaming, video encoding ect) you'll be just fine.

 

Now i dont have much experience with running windows vm on unraid.  My server is currently running two as VDI for me and my wife and they both have 4gb of ram and no dedicated video, and we can do normal day to day computing (youtube, facebook ect ect)

[lionelhutz]

I have 7 Dockers and a W10 VM assigned 2gig of memory running in 8gig total and the server currently has 3.3gig of memory cached and 300meg free. This is about 2gig for unRAID and the Dockers to  run and 2gig for the VM. The VM certainly doesn't require 2gig overhead.

 

I don't see why you'd have any issue running 3 W10 VM's and your Dockers in 32 gig even if you did assign 8gig of ram per VM since that leaves 8gig for unRAID and the Dockers which should easily be enough. The server would just make more use of the disks during operations like transcoding a large file. If you did assign 4gig to the general purpose W10 VM's then you'd have even more free memory for unRAID to play with. Something like  2 x W10 @ 4gig + 1 x W10 @ 8gig leaves unRAID plus the Dockers with 16gig which should be more than enough. You could also do something like run all 3 at 5gig or 6gig if you wanted to free up a little extra memory for the Dockers.

 

I started with about 6 Dockers in 2gig of memory but stepped up the server processor and memory when I started running the Emby Docker. Then, I found it was so under-utilized I added the W10 VM for hooking to the TV and watching media instead of using another PC. I have 16gig but was having crashing problems so I was trying 8gig to see if it was the memory (I think it was one of the dockers but not sure yet) and haven't bothered to put the other 8gig back in yet. When I do, I'll put the VM back to 4gig and might add another one for testing or general use.

[testdasi]

I've just picked up another GPU and monitor to make a 3rd VM.  All VMs will be on 100% to make it easy for family to access.  My current memory usage with dockers and 2 VMs (4 cores and 8GB each) is pretty much always at my full 32GB, although some of this is cached.

 

If I buy another 32GB and create another 8GB VM will my usage jump to around 42gb (assuming around 2gb overhead on the VM), or will unraid benefit from the extra 20gb (main dockers are Plex, donate, CP, headphones) ??

 

I'm worried about spending £150-200 on ram and potentially wasting it, and wondering if better off halving the two more casual VMs to 4gb each?

 

Is there anything I can do to use the ram e.g. move Plex transcoding to ram?  Is this beneficial??

 

Or, is 4gb pushing it for a w10 VM and will I just be opening myself up to wife and kids moaning about lag and speed?  That's probably worth the extra spend!!!

 

I think you may not even need to upgrade your RAM. It all depends on the use case of each VM.

 

I actually have both a 2GB and a 4GB Win10 VM.

The 4GB can handle 30 Firefox tabs (with other things in the background) with ease.

The 2GB never had more than 3-4 simultaneous tabs but it has never lagged.

 

Logically speaking, I would say try the lower RAM VM first and see if she-who-must-be-obeyed complain.

 

However, if I were you, I would just buy the RAM regardless.

[DZMM]

 

I think you may not even need to upgrade your RAM. It all depends on the use case of each VM.

 

I actually have both a 2GB and a 4GB Win10 VM.

The 4GB can handle 30 Firefox tabs (with other things in the background) with ease.

The 2GB never had more than 3-4 simultaneous tabs but it has never lagged.

 

Logically speaking, I would say try the lower RAM VM first and see if she-who-must-be-obeyed complain.

 

However, if I were you, I would just buy the RAM regardless.

 

 

Thanks for all the answers.

 

 

Funnily enough I was checking my wife's laptop which was getting slow this morning, and it turned out that 4GB had fallen out (maybe when I replaced the keyboard a few months ago) - and it's running so much better with 8GB.  Yes, it was working before - but the experience was much better with 8GB.

 

 

I've purchased the 32GB - I saw a good deal on eBay for £95 for unused ram that I couldn't ignore, as my ram seems to be hard to get at the moment pushing £200+ in many places and I didn't want to be in a position in the future where I couldn't get it.  At that price it wasn't a hard decision.