i was drawn to "virtualization" by mostly gaming.  does unraid help at all in setting up a cybercafe of sorts? like having thin clients instead of running diskless which still consumes a lot of power and can still be expensive still, granting i have a beastly machine as a server running unraid. any thoughts on this?

Yes and no. It's also very expensive.

I have setup 3 gaming VMS on one x99 platform with a 14 core Xeon last year. Worked well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs6W3Xa_4cE&t=1s 

The Linus setup I think for real world is pointless. It was a great proof of concept and fun to see but not really a useful real-world build.

 

The cost is unreasonable. It is far better if you want that amount of gaming VMs would be to have 2 or 3 servers which would run better and be easier to manage trouble shoot as well. And probably about a third of the cost.

A problem you may have with running multiple VMs over a LAN is the LAN itself.  Using thin clients to stream the gaming VMS will need a lot of bandwidth on the network so this could be a limiting factor with a lot of gaming VMs running over a LAN at once. It would depend on how many VMs are being streamed over the network at once.

Also in Linus's 7 gamers if you were to stream all 7 at once over a LAN then they would all be using virtual NICs sharing the NICs on the server. Another reason why smaller servers

would be better. Also, you could use a separate network and switch for each server, so you wouldn't have the same bandwidth problems if they all shared the same network.