VM on Unraid Hardware

[Arbadacarba]

Considering using Unraid but have no idea if what I want to do is possible... Or even a good idea.

 

I have a server that I use for file sharing and plex... And a few other windows tasks that are remotely accessed.

 

It has a fairly large number of large drives connected to it and 3 1TB SSD's that I want to use for cacheing. As well as a NVMe drive that I would use for houseing a Windows 10 virtual machine drive.

 

What I want to do is install Unraid on my bare metal server, install the plex server on that and then run a VM of Windows on it to run the Windows components that I need...

 

My question is this... Can I set up the virtual machine to run directly on the Unraid server? As in plug a keyboard, mouse, and Monitor into the server and have that monitor see the VM... So if my wife needs to sit down at the Unraid servers connected peripherals she can be easily looking at a windows 10 computer.

 

I know I've restated the question twice there... But I'm trying to avoid confusion. I've tried searching and just can't seem to find the answer to that.

 

Thank you

 

[Squid]

2 hours ago, Arbadacarba said:

My question is this... Can I set up the virtual machine to run directly on the Unraid server? As in plug a keyboard, mouse, and Monitor into the server and have that monitor see the VM... So if my wife needs to sit down at the Unraid servers connected peripherals she can be easily looking at a windows 10 computer.

Yes, but you need to passthrough to the VM the Video Card, and ideally a USB controller (so she can plug in and out flash drives, etc and have the VM recognize it just like a baremetal machine.

 

Many users do this.

[testdasi]

+1 what Squid said

 

Also, you don't necessarily need to buy a USB PCIe card. In many cases, the motherboard USB controller is in its own IOMMU group that can be passed through to the VM.

For example, my motherboard (and all X399 motherboards, as far as I have seen) has 2 USB  3.0 controllers in separate IOMMU groups so I can actually run 2 separate VM's with hot-plug-able USB ports (4 each) without having to buy a separate PCIe card.