To virtualize or not to virtualize Unraid under ESXi... that is the question ;p


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So I purchased a Threadripper 3970x and I am almost ready to start building this monster machine. It is replacing two machines.

 

One is my dedicated Unraid workhorse that houses a 7980xe with an Nvidia Quadro P2000. The Quadro is used for transcoding. It has 9 drives with 25 Tb of usable space and 32 Gb of RAM. I use my Unraid server for my media, virtualization labs (building Microsoft domains for testing) and I heavily utilize Eve-NG and GNS3. For the most part the space is used to hold my media. 

 

The other machine is my daily, everyday machine that is used for gaming and all other things. It is a first-gen 1920x Threadripper, has 32 Gb RAM, two Samsung NVME drives as the main drives and a Nvidia 2080 TI GPU. 

 

My plan is to consolidate the nine drives and two graphic cards into the new build with 64 Gb RAM and two new larger NVME drives. My issue is not knowing which direction to go and whether or not to re-install my Unraid build within ESXi or to make Unraid my base OS. Since I already have VM's running within Unraid I am leaning in that direction, but I know how VMware works and the ease of deploying on that hypervisor. My only concern is that passthrough of my GPU's will not work quite as well within ESXi versus Unraid. I want to make sure I don't have a huge impact on my gaming situation, however lite I game, I still want to be able to do that. 

 

What has your experience been with GPU Passthrough in ESXi and how has that impacted gaming? I'd also need to passthrough the P2000 into Unraid for transcoding which means I'd need one additional GPU for ESXi. 

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34 minutes ago, BRiT said:

Minor related question, can you not simply upgrade your client media players so you dont need to transcode for media playback?

No. Not necessarily. I have a mix of devices and also I share my library with family and they have a tendency to use whatever flavor box/tv that supports Plex, hence the need for the P2000 card for transcoding. Also I find the P2000 helps tremendously with transcoding the UHD/4K media I have and that continues to grow in selection. If all I was dealing with was 720p/1080p media then yes I could possibly just tell my family to upgrade to a slightly better device, but for them to be able to support 4K they would need to be on my network and 4K conversions need a dedicated GPU to assist with that workload versus offloading to a few cores on the CPU. 

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You can test out pass-through by plugging your 2080 Ti to the current Unraid server and play with it. (hint 1: it has 4 devices that will all need to be passed through together + you will need a vbios rom so watch SpaceInvader One guide on youtube on vfio stubbing and vbios dumping).

 

Given you have a dedicated GPU for Unraid, you should have a relatively smoother path passing through the 2080 Ti.  (hint 2: get a Gigabyte motherboard  - Gigabyte BIOS allows you to pick any of the 4 PCIe x16 slot for initial display i.e. what Unraid boots with - flexibility in terms of which GPU is plugged into which slot).

Edited by testdasi
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  • 3 weeks later...

I keep revisiting this question myself.  I really miss the proper features of an enterprise or semi-pro virtualisation system like VMWare / Proxmox (and even FreeNAS recognising it's not so great for VM's / docker, but does have extensive configuration capability).  I also miss proper file sharing support and domain controllers which may sound harsh, but Unraid barely scrapes this into an acceptable solution.  I miss proper user accounts and proper directory synchronisation and proper file transfer speeds.  I miss true bare metal, native ZFS support in the above respective cases, docker / VM dependency mapping, Virtual Machine backups, snapshotting, LXC, proper status graphs, and more integrated VM info via the qemu client toolset.  I also miss a proper functioning GUI networking configuration tool and a reliable cache.  It's quite frustrating when you know about this stuff and it's either not available or only nearly there.

 

However, I do love unraid's disk expandability which even though it kills performance, is more than adequate as a media store, I love UNRAID's GPU passthrough and all other hardware passthrough, which is clearly in a class of it's own, it's simplicity for pinning cores to VM's and docker containers or excluding them altogether.  I love its flexibility with adding and removing disks, its community of add on features that make things quick and easy via docker, the way lime tech diligently make it work for all sorts of hardware with barely a grumble and I love it's price.  I mostly like its Docker GUI and it's VM template setup.  I love how extensible it is, with the community plugins and what people manage to do with it.  I love how it has frequent updates and quickly passes on new kernel features.  I also love that they've clearly spent time thinking about making the support easy and that the support is included in the price.

 

So depending on the use case it's either an insane an incredibly hard to beat package for the price, or completely missing the necessary features.  It's hard to think of another product that's so conflicting in it's capabilities with the norm, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they skipped over all the important stuff to get to the fun stuff.  But then you realise the gold in this.  Somehow, limetech have managed to take a true snapshot of their target market customer.  The customer that doesn't want, care or even know about those other things.  And when you realise that, you realise just how good of a job they've done.  IT companies now are still struggling to get as closely aligned to it's customer as limetech have.  I just wish they'd offer up a plus version that has the typical virtualisation options, I'd be buying that and be happy at the price.

 

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