VM to improve performance?

[Surgikill]

Hey all,

 

I'm looking into buying a 720xd (I need more bays) and I'm in a quandry. I'd like to put a GPU in it to use NVENC transcoding for plex, as well as have it run all my other applications (plex, nginx, nextcloud, bitwarden, etc.). The issues I am having right now is that whenever the array is backing up from cache or moving excessive amounts of data, everything slows to a crawl and IOWAIT spikes. I was thinking I could run a VM on top of unraid, but have that disk for the VM be outside of the array and set it up as a ssd or NVME drive. Then I could mount that disk and use it for the VM, and just back the VM up to the array nightly. This would allow the VM to run independently and I could move most of my docker applications over to the VM.

 

My questions are:

 

1) Will I see a noticeable performance improvement with this, or will the high IOWAIT still interrupt my VM

2) If my array is taken offline, will the VM ssd still stay mounted and functional?

 

The point of my doing this is to basically save power. I have a 710 right now that I could turn into a secondary server, but being in Florida I would not only be using a bunch of power to run the server, I would also be spending money to cool it. Any suggestions are helpful.

 

Thanks.