Hi everyone,

 

I just finished building my first unRAID rig which will host my personal W10 gaming VM, provide NAS/Plex services and have the option of hosting a headless linux box if I ever need it.

 

My goal with this build is to provide my W10 VM with two things: 1)As transparent and convenient operation as possible I.E. I don't want to know the virtualization layer is even there never mind spend time maintaining it after I set it up 2) Get the most out of my hardware without making life difficult for myself per my previous point.

 

Before I proceed with the VM creation there are couple of questions I wanted to ask.

 

1 What would be the best way to handle USB controller pass through? (hostdev vs qemu:arg) I purchased PCI-e USB controller that I dedicated for unRAID so I could pass through all three controllers on my mobo directly to my VM. Is there a reason why my quick search on the forums didn't reveal any previous solutions like this?

 

2 I have a Samsung NVME SSD that I want to dedicate for my VM as a boot drive and get the best possible performance out of it. How I should go about this? I was planning on possibly adding a one or two NVME drives to my rig in the future to function as cache drive (I don't currently have one). Can I still do that if I pass through the NVME controller to my VM? (I.E. are those slot specific?) 

 

As I have used unRAID only couple of hours step by step instructions and reasoned answers are more then welcome as I always welcome the opportunity to learn something new.

 

 

 

20 minutes ago, Rantanplan said:

1 What would be the best way to handle USB controller pass through? (hostdev vs qemu:arg) I purchased PCI-e USB controller that I dedicated for unRAID so I could pass through all three controllers on my mobo directly to my VM. Is there a reason why my quick search on the forums didn't reveal any previous solutions like this?

 

Stub the card (isolating it from unraid) and passthrough the entire card to the vm.

 

20 minutes ago, Rantanplan said:

2 I have a Samsung NVME SSD that I want to dedicate for my VM as a boot drive and get the best possible performance out of it. How I should go about this? I was planning on possibly adding a one or two NVME drives to my rig in the future to function as cache drive (I don't currently have one). Can I still do that if I pass through the NVME controller to my VM? (I.E. are those slot specific?) 

 

Have your vm .img file saved onto that drive during creation or move it there later. Passthrough of specific drives may be possible but someone else with more experience with nvme drives will have to chime it, but some of that will also be hardware specific perhaps...