VM accessed locally

[Gottria]

Not sure what forum this goes on so feel free to move if needed.

 

Looking at unraid for a small system of 6 drives that will be located in my garage, is it possible to have a VM with windows 10 and access it from the same PC that is running unraid? When working on the car in the garage I'll stream Pandora or look up some PDFs online for what I'm working on, that's about it. Right now it's a windows 8 machine running drivepool. 

[JonathanM]

Yes, possibly, no, depends on the exact hardware.

 

You need a motherboard and CPU that support passthrough, along with enough RAM to run unraid and the VM simultaneously, and a video card that will pass through properly.

 

Unraid itself is perfectly capable of doing what you want, the hardware you have is the determining factor.

[Gottria]

I'm running an i3 4170 on an Asus Z87i deluxe motherboard with 8gb of ram. Also using the built in graphics card for video. 

[SSD]

1 hour ago, Gottria said:

I'm running an i3 4170 on an Asus Z87i deluxe motherboard with 8gb of ram. Also using the built in graphics card for video. 

 

It would be a little tight. CPU has 2 cores, and to run a VM you'd probably need to leave one core assigned to unRaid, so only 50% of your horsepower would go the the VM. And similarly you'd have to give about 4G (maybe less if not running Dockers) say 2G for unRaid, leaving 6G for the VM. Probably ok. You might try giving all the cores to the VM (sharing is a better term). Problem is that unRaid can be "starved" and cause it to crash. But that was a problem forever ago and KVM continues to march forward. At this point it could have been solved. Conventional wisdom here continues to be leave first core for unRaid.

 

You could likely pass through the igpu. But you need to confirm or is UEFI compliant.

 

So I think it's feasible. You're not going to be recomputing large spreadsheets in record time, transcoding video with handbrake, or playing the latest games, but for light duty I'd say it would work for web browsing, PDF viewing, and watching YouTube, you'd likely be fine.

[Gottria]

So it looks like my system is a bit on the lean side to run this type of configuration. I'll leave it a Win 8 box for now till I can get another PC down there to just run windows then switch it over to a dedicated unraid box.