Just a quick question...

Can Unraid run truly headless?

 

Right now I have a old-ish core I5 that I'm testing as a Unraid Server. Also I have a Geforce 970 that I'm using as passthough to a Windows 10 VM.

 

I would love to upgrade this to a Xeon (mostly for the hypertreading, but I'm avoiding I7 because the price is too much for me)

 

My mobo does not support headless boot, but for the mobo I have a graphics card that has a valid bios that will boot just fine (the 970)

 

right now I'm running Unraid from the IGP of the I5. If I get the Xeon I would lose the IGP... could this work in somehow? Like I don't need to use the console of the unraid right on the sever, I can always SSH to it...

 

But it seem very strange to me boot from one video card and then dropping it to the VM and all this juggling...

 

And although I still have one PCI-E slot, I really would like to use it for other things, and I don't have another video card to put in there.

21 hours ago, GuilhermeFluis said:

Can Unraid run truly headless?

Unraid itself can run headless, if the motherboard will boot that way. However, if there is a video card present, the motherboard may keep it from being reassigned to a VM. It's not unraid, it's the hardware that determines whether it will work the way you want.

I boot my unraid in headless mode with a dedicated GPU and without an iGPU on the CPU. The dedicated GPU then passes to any VM I choose to start without a problem.

 

Does that qualify as truly headless?

58 minutes ago, Ver7o said:

I boot my unraid in headless mode with a dedicated GPU and without an iGPU on the CPU. The dedicated GPU then passes to any VM I choose to start without a problem.

 

Does that qualify as truly headless?

This works for me as well (ASRock Taichi X399, multiple AMD X5n0 cards). In a previous configuration, I had up to 4 discrete GPUs in my system all passed through to VMs. As noted, passing through the unRAID boot GPU can be finicky, but is entirely possible with the right hardware combination.