I'm in the process of building a dual CPU workstation which will be used for 3d modeling, rendering and media editing and processing - I want to install 3 VM's on the computer:

VM 1&2 - Will split system resources symmetrically, each VM gets 1 CPU, half of the ram and a dedicated GPU - I want to run 1&2 at the same time (basically have 2 workstations)

VM 3 - I would like to be able to run the third if I want all resources of the computer at once. (obviously the other 2 VM's won't be running while VM 3 is active)

 

Is this possible and should I have any considerations while building the machine?

 

The PC configuration so far is:

Asus z10pe-d8 ws - Motherboard

2x Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 - CPU's

2x Nvidia GTX 1080ti - GPU's

Samsung 960pro 1tb - main HD

You can't give each vm half the available ram at the same time because unRaid needs something. Well, I mean, you "can" but you shouldn't.

 

Read the cpu pinning thread. You can increase performance/stability and reduce latency on vm 1&2 a little by using an emulator pin in many situations.

 

IF you aren't doing anything else on unRaid, you can assign most of the ram and even all the cores to 1 vm. I do this often for distributed transcoding. Now, how is usability as a desktop? I dont know, I boot it headless, send it data, it crunches it and regurgitates it back, and then I turn it off when done. Some people will tell you that you should leave 1 core for unraid and as an emulator pin, but my benchmarking shows (for me) that if unRaid isn't doing anything, you get more raw performance from the vm with all cores assigned vs leaving 1 for unRaid.

 

You will also have some loss to overhead management of the vm by unRaid. How much varies from computer to computer.