Hello my dear Unraiders

 

For half a year now I wish to upgrade my 'NAS'-PC to something... more. First, excuse bad english or typos, its not my primary language.

Some information about me:

- I've build plenty of gaming/office desktop PCs within the last years: silent, performance, really small cases... I guess for what I want next this 'skill' will be sufficient.

- Currently, we have about 10 devices in the house which access personal data of 3 different uses (images, vids, documents) and movies/series (backuped from our dvds/blurays) from a central NAS PC.

- I have never done anything like docker or virtualization by myself until now, only read the last 6 month about it.

- The NAS PC currently runs 'OpenMediaVault', boots up by itself around 7am and shutsdown earliest as 11pm (from then on it waits until all accessing devices have closed their connections) - no need to burn electricity all the night  

- 2 times a week, a backup script will sync the personal data drive to an attached external device (which turns itself on and off based on day and time, so its active only 4 hours/week).

- I work as a software developer for a year now. At work, we each have a development machine running a VM with the IDE and other background scripts and stuff, SVN backups to another server, QA tests our stuff on another server,.... so, one machine for a task you could say (I still don't know everything we have running at the office, but thats the stuff I know of). On our dev machines, the VMs are handled by 'vmware workstation'.

 

So, the NAS drives are full, the CPU is so slow, download speeds from internet are faster then unzipping, and I haven't developed at home for the last year because, well, I see what Ihave at work and come home to my one gaming-rig and the laptop used for everything from the living room couch.... But there is now "dev-environment". So, what I wanted to to, is upgrade the NAS to a VM server.

 

I'm going to list up everything I want to achieve with this new rig, so, if something is not possible with unraid or difficult or whatever else you think about when reading, please comment about it. I want to be completely sure before I go on buying the hardware in 1 or 2 weeks.

 

- I'm no fan of parity disks or RAID setups, so I want the PC to go on running on disc basis. Like, 'this disc is for movies, this for series, this has user A data,...' and so on.

- Every disc has at least one backup disc in another 'NAS only' PC, just backing up stuff if anything fails. Personal data gets another backup on external device.

- I would like to run a couple of VMs like: 

- - Windows VM for graphic accelerated applications (photo/video editing, transcoding), so this VM needs GPU passthrough I guess...?

- - Linux based VM for web-dev tools (IDE, apache, ...)

- - Windows VM for c# dev tools (Visual studio,...)

- - Linux based VM for testing stuff from the dev VM

- - Windows VM for office stuff (email management/archiving, word, excel, ....)

- - maybe more once I got a hand for it.

- I also would like the docker stuff, I guess I can run 3 containers with the same application, accessing the network shares and being accessed by different IP addresses?

- I still want my time related stuff (boot up at time X, shut down at time Y when no network access and no VM running)

- most of the time, the VMs won't be needed. Just have my dockers running and the network shares. But if I need a VM, I would love it if you could start them by something like a wake-on-lan packet to their IP instead of having to access a web UI and running them manually.

- Backup will be handled from another machine, so not needed from this one.

 

I hope I haven't forgotten something important. If so, I will add it later

About the hardware I consider, I'm going to spend some grands on this (mostly for high capacity HDDs)

CPU: 8c/16t AMD Ryzen (think about the 1700).

Mainboard: some B350 µatx board, nothing special.

RAM: 32gig of high clocked (board compatible) RAM as I read a review of Ryzen showing it will gladly make use of it. 

HDDs: 8TB drives like WD Red I guess (so, not the cheapest of the cheapest).

SSD: 500GB Samsung 850 Evo for cache. Will it improve performance if for example 2 devices stream different bluray-rips (~25gigs each)?

M2: I wanted to get 250GB M2 disc (Samsung 960 EVO?) for the VM images and docker containers...?

GPU: a Radeon RX 550 GPU for the first mentioned Windows VM. Do I need another GPU for the UNRAID host? And do I need one GPU for each VM to have them running 'fluently' or will UNRAID emulate some basic GPU adapter for it (like VMware does at work), so you get some basic DirectX/OpenGL for fluent window displaying and stuff like that?

Some PCI-E Controller Card for the storage HDDs, since most boards don't have enough fast SATA connectors.

 

It has become a long post, didn't mean to write that much. But if you read this, thanks for reading the rest of it.

 

I would really appreciate any advice from anyone having any experience with that stuff I would like to do.

Thanks in advance.  

Before you buy anything, read the Ryzen threads about current issues running unRaid.

 

5 hours ago, 1812 said:

Before you buy anything, read the Ryzen threads about current issues running unRaid.

 

6.4 (currently in beta) adds support for Ryzen, make sure to check there as well.

I have no leg to stand on with AMD, but personally I'd avoid it. They have had a bunch of issues... even the new Kernals dont have fully baked support.

 

Lastly I'd get a Xeon with ECC ram.