New build advice

[Mylo75]

I am running an unraid server and a Windows 10 pc. Specs below

 

Unraid Server
M/B: Supermicro - X8DTL
CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
HVM: Enabled
IOMMU: Enabled
Cache: 256 kB, 1024 kB, 8192 kB
Memory: 12 GB (max. installable capacity 192 GB)
Network: bond0: fault-tolerance (active-backup), mtu 1500
eth0: 1000 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500
eth1: not connected
Kernel: Linux 4.18.10-unRAID x86_64
OpenSSL: 1.1.0i

600 watt Power supply

5 6tb WD RED drives and 1 8tb parity drive

 

Home PC
Motherboard   Asus P8Z77-V LX 
Memory   Corsair CM3B4G2C1600L9 2x4GB
8GB  DIMM DDR3 clocked @ 1600 MHz
Nvidia GTX 750 Ti
Cpu Intel Core i5-3570K   overclocked
LGA1155, 1 CPU, 4 cores, 4 threads Base clock 3.4 GHz, turbo 4.1 GHz
OS Windows 10

 

1: Is it possible to build a new server and merge 2 computers into 1 and have a family/wife friendly Windows 10 vm running through unraid where I can hot swap USB devices. 

 

2: Usage is media storage for kodi boxes, running maybe 8 dockers, 1 plex transcode, main windows vm which I do 1080p video and photo editing plus some medium gaming usage. I would like the option to run maybe a couple of other vms as I like to tinker and learn. And of course be future proofed. Using the 5 6tb WD RED drives and 1 8tb ironwolf parity drive from my current server. 

 

3: Cpu's I've been looking at Xeon e-2176g £399?, Xeon w-2135 £750 & w-2145 £1050 (very expensive though) i7-8086K £489,  i9-9900k £599 but no eec memory with i7 and i9. 6 core or 8 Core, eec memory or no eec memory. 

 

4: How much memory would be needed and would a nvidia 1060 or higher gpu be enough? 

 

5: Where and what to install Windows vm on. 

 

Advice and constructive criticism welcome. 

[DZMM]

#1 and #2 are definitely doable with a good CPU with a decent core count. 

 

I run 3xW10 VMs on my build where each has 3 cores out of 14 so approximately a passmark of around 3700.  Each works absolutely fine for medium gaming (Doom, rocket league) , so I'd use that as your yardstick for gaming.  For Plex they say you need around 2k passmark per transcode, but personally I think this is out of date and should be lower now and also you can limit transcoding needs by using the right clients or creating optimised versions in advance.

 

#3 have you considered threadripper?  If I was buying a new CPU this would be on my 'most consider' list due to the high core/£ ratio

 

#4 unraid doesn't need a lot of RAM, but I'd budget 8-10GB per concurrent VM

 

#5 unRAID manages creating the VMs for you - you just need a licence key (I get mine of ebay for a few quid) and a GPU, keyboard and mouse to passthrough to each concurrent VM

 

 

[Mylo75]

Thanks for replying DZMM. 

 

Reading posts here on the forum Intel cpu seems to be more stable and reliable for vm usage. 

 

If I create 3 vms and allocate the same core 0 & 1 and 10gb of ram to each vm, am I correct in thinking that each vm will share the 2 cores and the same 10gb of memory. 

 

 

[DZMM]

I think the threadripper situation is improving - just saying worth a thought.

 

The VMs can't share memory and sharing cores isn't a good idea if they running at the same time as you'll get very bad performance - VMs work best when they have dedicated cores