Is this build possible

[Grant]

Hello,

 

I am writing to find out how I could accomplish the following with the unraid system.

 

I am trying to achieve the following:

 

1 tower that houses cpu, ram, hard drives, and gpu's.

 

I have 4 chromebooks.

 

How can I turn the tower into a hub where each chromebook can remote into its own windows VM and each vm will have specific cores, ram, and a gpu.  All four Chromebooks will share the hard drive. 

 

So in essence, the chromebooks are just a screen, keyboard and mouse portal into a vm that is housed on my system, and the vm will give near like close to the metal performance (of course with wifi or ethernet connection dictating the performance seen on chromebook)

 

Am I reaching to high?  I am trying to get my two boys and wife access to my tower via vm via chromebook connection so that all four of us can be one one system at the same time, but all doing something different. 

 

Any advice would be grand.

[tdallen]

Hello and welcome.

 

It's possible to do what you want with unRAID.  You will, however, need a beefy tower setup to run 4 windows VMs.  What do you want to run in the VMs?

 

Note - unRAID isn't a hypervisor.  It's an operating system with a long history as a NAS, and a really nice hypervisor implementation based on KVM that is now included.  What you'd like to do is still "enthusiast level" stuff on unRAID, but it can work.

[Grant]

Specs currently:

MOBO: ASUS X99 Rampage V Edition 10

CPU: I76850K (6 CORE) 12 HYPER

RAM: DDR4 128GIG

SSD : 2 X 850 EVO 1TB

NVME: 960 EVO 1TB

GPU: 1060 X 3

 

VM1 = wife uses mostly for browsing and storing family photos until they hit cloud storage

VM2= son, will have 1 gpu for games - does a lot of online video courses.  Needs some storage.  Programming projects.

VM3 = son, will have 1 gpu for games - same as above son.

VM4 = me, will have 1 gpu,  developing c# .net, studying front and backend dev. 

 

VM4 would have the keyboard and mouse attached to tower.

VM1-3 would be using a Chromebook as their monitor, keyboard and mouse. 

 

Wanted to have it where, all 4 of us can be using our respective VM at the same time.   

 

I have seen some videos on youtube where lime tech is able to achieve near bare metal with its windows 10 vm etc...which is exactly what I am trying to achieve x 4

 

thanks!

 

[JonathanM]

Using a chromebook with a remote desktop connection will not be nearly as responsive as a physically connected monitor keyboard and mouse, even with a GPU driving it. Also, you will probably need a monitor emulator plug to fake out the GPU into working properly. Many GPU's won't run without a connected monitor.

 

Have you verified that your motherboard and CPU will correctly separate out all the hardware for 3 VM's with hardware passthrough to all run at the same time?

 

Hardware passthrough can be tough to find the right combination of parts for multiple VM's. 1VM with hardware passthrough - easy, almost any modern hardware combo can handle it. 2 simultaneous, MUCH harder. 3 at once, better find a working combo to copy, otherwise be prepared for a lot of headaches and parts swapping to find a combo that works.

[tdallen]

I agree with jonathonm, this just got problematic.  6 cores, 2 gaming VMs and 1 software development VM = really challenging.  Both games and software development like CPU cycles and are much better suited to the responsiveness of hardware pass-through rather than remote access.  You've got plenty of RAM, but you're going to run out of cores and PCIex lanes with the current setup - not to mention the compatibility issues of multiple pass-through VMs.  How much of a challenge are you up for?

 

And don't forget - unRAID is an OS - it needs resources, too!