New here needing some advice

[Taza]

Hey every one 

 

Im looking to create an unraid server for plex but also want a VM to run windows so my young fella can play fortnite on it

 

Im looking at 

I7 9700

Gigabyte S1151 ATX Z390 AORUS Elite 

32GB ram splitting 16gb for plex and 16 for windows

 And hoping to use on board GPU for transcoding plex and a Nvidia 2070 for the vm passthru

Drives i currently have are 3x 2TB, 1x 6TB and 1 480GB SSD

 

All advice would be great 

 

Cheers 

Taza 

[trurl]

43 minutes ago, Taza said:

32GB ram splitting 16gb for plex and 16 for windows

The Unraid OS will require some RAM so not a perfect split to only these.

 

44 minutes ago, Taza said:

Drives i currently have are 3x 2TB, 1x 6TB and 1 480GB SSD

Parity (not required but recommended) must be at least as large as any single data disk, so the 6TB would be parity. The SSD would be cache.

 

Do you have any data on these? Unraid must format any disk it will use in the parity array or cache pool.

[Taza]

Hey thanks for the reply

 

Good point on the ram

 

Might go 8gb for unraid, 8gb for plex and 16 for vm

I was definately looking at using the 6TB as parity unless i come across a 10TB for a good price. The drive do have data but happy to loose them as only tv and movies and they are on my 30TB QNAP nas

 

Cheers 

Taza

 

[naughty beatle]

12 hours ago, Taza said:

Might go 8gb for unraid, 8gb for plex and 16 for vm

I'm by no means an expert but I've heard a few times 2GB is enough for Plex. I have 16GB total, 12GB for Win VM and I let unRAID OS manage the remaining 4GB between Plex, 5-6 other docker containers and it's own needs. Personally I find this is more than enough for my needs. Just my two cents if you're looking to save a little money on your build, you can always throw in extra sticks of RAM later if you have the slots.

[Taza]

Hey people i ended up getting new better setup cheaper than what i was going to build.

 

Now have

I9-9900K

Gigabyte z390 Pro MB

32gb 3200mhz T-Force ram

Cool master water cooling with 360mm radiator 

10tb hhd for parity

6tb

4tb

2tb all for storage

480gb ssd for cache.

Took 22hrs to sync parity. Now how to learn to use unraid and set up folders for plex and figure the vm side of things 

 

Taz 

[Ascii227]

On 10/2/2019 at 8:59 AM, Taza said:

Might go 8gb for unraid, 8gb for plex and 16 for vm

My 2 cents on your build as I have almost exactly the same set up and have been running it for over a year.

 

You wont need to separate the ram between plex and unraid. If you have 32gb in your system and you assign 16gb to your windows VM, then unraid will just see the other 16gb as available and dynamically dish it out to the plex docker as it sees fit (assuming you will be running plex in a docker?).

 

I would advise cpu pinning, but again no need to pin plex as you may be opening yourself up to problems in the future. I have a 6 core i7 8700k and I pin 3 of the cores with their hyperthreading pairs to my windows vm, and just allow unraid to manage to the other 3 cores between itself and the other dockers including plex.

 

I went down the path of trying to pin plex to its own cpu cores with its own separated ram, however I found that sometimes the unraid os would need those resources more (for example in a parity rebuild) whereas other times plex would need the resources more (when transcoding/scanning/generating thumbnails etc). In the end it was easier to just let the os manage the docker resources and seperate off hardware for the VM only.

 

Transcoding plex through intel quicksync (onboard) whilst gaming on the separate gpu works really well, no problems there at all!

[Taza]

Hey mate that was really helpful thanks for that. 

 

So with pinning i have 8 cores and 16 threads (HT)

 

How do i set these. And if i get stuck can i msg you lol

 

Cheers

Taza

[Ascii227]

10 hours ago, Taza said:

So with pinning i have 8 cores and 16 threads (HT)

 

How do i set these. And if i get stuck can i msg you lol

Unraid makes this easy. Just go into settings and there is an option for cpu pinning.

 

After you have created your vm you can choose which cores you want to pin it to, and then I would also recomend isolating the same cores. Isolating them alows only the pinned application to use the cores and stops unraid from using them at all. If you dont isolate them then unraid will use them for plex and other things slowing your windows vm down. Both options are on the cpu pinning settings page.

 

Leaving the dockers unpinned just leaves unraid to manage them as it normally would, using the unpinned cores and any available ram.

 

I have included a screenshot of my settings for clarity.

 

If you get stuck, check out the spaceinvader one videos. They are a great help for things like this and explain it better than I ever could:

 

 

Edited October 15, 2019 by Ascii227

[Taza]

On 10/1/2019 at 9:50 PM, trurl said:

The Unraid OS will require some RAM so not a perfect split to only these.

 

Parity (not required but recommended) must be at least as large as any single data disk, so the 6TB would be parity. The SSD would be cache.

 

Do you have any data on these? Unraid must format any disk it will use in the parity array or cache pool.

sorry didnt realise i typo'd i have 1x 10TB parity, 1x 6TB, 1x 4TB, 1x 2TB for array and 1 480GB Cache

 

Cheers

Taza