Greetings from a so-far satisfied user

[Mike Howles]

Hello folks,

 

So I'm close to biting the bullet and moving from tinkering with Unraid and going full crazy with it as a strange hybrid gaming/NAS/Docker/VM/development rig.  Fortunately I already had an overpowered gaming rig, so I'm hopeful that Unraid will allow me to use it to its fuller potential.

 

Specs:

ASUS STRIX Z370-E Gaming Motherboard

Intel i7 8700K

64 GB DDR4 RAM

2 Geforce GTX 1080s with SLI bridge (the bridge doesn't seem to come across when I expose both cards to a VM at the moment, though)

 

I've been running the trial increasingly over the past 2 or 3 weeks, slowly shucking old external drives and consolidating the data (and discovering along the way a few of the drives were in their death throws).  So I'm currently in the "musical chairs" stage of moving the data to fewer but larger drives, so after a few trips to Costco, I now own 3x Seagate 8GTB drives ($139/ea, was surprised how cheap), where 2 will stay as Array drives, and one will serve as Parity.

 

And finally, I've got a handful of SSDs that 1 of which will act as Cache drive, and another is currently nativly booting to Windows 10 (for SLI and VR reasons) but also is bootable within Unraid VM via /dev/disk/by-id/xyz123 method for other gaming where VR or SLI is not needed.

 

As someone who has been running VMWare Vsphere for 2 years now on 2 Intel NUC Skull Canyons, this is definitely a neat change and different approach to running a VM/Docker/storage/development home lab.  The benefit I've found so far is that the Web UI is quite easy to use, and the storage and shares seem quite flexible.  While I was not ever able to try PCIE passthrough in a NUC because it was a NUC, PCIE passthrough in Unraid made it very easy.  I had initially been Googling KVM and QEMU and passthrough and it looked intimidatingly complicated, however folks like Linus Tech Tips and Space Invader One have been invaluable in their videos and I cannot give them enough props for such encouraging and helpful videos.

 

Hopefully as the final 8TB drives complete clearing and I can button the case back up, I'll have a fun photo to post of the final "build" (are builds ever actually DONE though? ;)) and also I hope to be able to return some knowledge or tutorials if I come up with new techniques with some of my programming experience.

 

Great product!

[trurl]

Welcome! Sounds like you have really done your homework.

9 minutes ago, Mike Howles said:

I hope to be able to return some knowledge

I hope so too. We can always use more knowledgeable people on the forum.

[limetech]

Yes, welcome!

36 minutes ago, Mike Howles said:

2 Geforce GTX 1080s with SLI bridge (the bridge doesn't seem to come across when I expose both cards to a VM at the moment, though) 

I think this is a known limitation with passing SLI-capable GPU's to a VM.  @jonp can probably provide more info...

[jonp]

Yes, welcome!
I think this is a known limitation with passing SLI-capable GPU's to a VM.  [mention=62528]jonp[/mention] can probably provide more info...

That is correct. There is some voodoo black magic behind sli that makes it unusable with VMs at this point. We made attempts with NVIDIA to see if we could get it to work but they are unwilling to assist. For now, VMs don't work with SLI configs.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Mike Howles]

@jonp @limetech thanks for that quick update.  I understand and it is quite a a minor trade-off.  To be quite honest, many of the PC games that I am playing do not benefit tremendously from SLI anyway.  For instance, even with a single 1080, I am able to push 144fps to my 144hz monitor in a game like Overwatch (both bare-metal, and passthrough, which is mind blowing to me.)

 

So what this should actually be able to free me up to do is use one GPU to game on, and the second for possibly some long running CUDA task in a separate VM.  I'd rather keep all the CUDA stuff separate from my Windows 10 gaming OS anyway.  This makes Unraid a great fit for me.

 

For my other limitation, I've nearly gotten VR to work (Lenovo Windows MR setup) and it actually will pass through the Lenovo USB headset and acts like it wants to run through the setup, however it then ends with an error code that leads me to believe that I actually will need to pass through an actual USB controller itself.

 

Last week I purchased a Startech USB PCIE card (the one with 4 controllers thinking that would be beneficial).  I was able to follow through some tutorials to expose this PCIE device to my VM, and it is passed through, however all 4 controllers have a yellow warning error sign with error code = 10 message.  My Googling turned up a few others having the same result.  Perhaps I chose these wrong card, which is a shame, as it was (for a USB card) relatively pricier at $80.  I'll keep investigating this and maybe post in a support thread at a later time to see if there is a better approach or figure out what I am doing wrong.  It would be GREAT to not have to boot bare metal into Win 10 for VR!

Thanks again on the SLI tip.  That saves me trying to find a solution in vain!

[limetech]

I successfully used this card to pass USB ports to a win10 VM for Oculus:

Sonnet USB3-PRO-4PM-E Allegro Pro 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Card

 

Nice thing about that card is that each USB port is in it's own IOMMU group.

[Mike Howles]

Just now, limetech said:

I successfully used this card to pass USB ports to a win10 VM for Oculus:

Sonnet USB3-PRO-4PM-E Allegro Pro 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Card

 

Nice thing about that card is that each USB port is in it's own IOMMU group.

Yeah, I picked the Startech one for a similar reason.  Maybe I'll return it and get the one you have.

 

And regarding the Oculus working, I've seen others mentioning they've gotten Oculus working, however my issue is how Windows Mixed Reality setup is interpreting the USB plugin on the headset not being quite right.  I'll give the Sonnet a go probably and see if this solves it.  Thanks!