Least amount of cores and ram for Unraid needed.

[GreenEyedMonster]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm planning on building a VM only UnRaid Server. I know I can use linux etc... but UnRaid is just a lot easier for me!  So with that in mind how many cores and ram should be left over for UnRaid to still run smoothly enough not to break anything?  

 

Thanks!! 

[testdasi]

CPU: at least 1 logical core, preferably 1 physical core (i.e. 2 hyper-threaded cores).

RAM: 2GB is generally safe

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, GreenEyedMonster said:

So with that in mind how many cores and ram should be left over for UnRaid to still run smoothly enough not to break anything?  

I would approach it slightly differently. I would slowly increase the amount of resources from a minimum on the VM's until you don't see an increase in real (not synthetic benchmark) performance.

 

Remember the hypervisor (Unraid KVM here) is creating much of the hardware the VM guest thinks it sees on the fly. So by artificially limiting the amount of resources Unraid has available, you may be severely limiting the ultimate performance of the guests. So, if the VM runs well on 1 physical core and 4GB ram, why give it more than it needs to run? Linux is generally very good in using all the resources available, and guest VM's don't readily give back resources to the host. Once you block out RAM for a guest, it's pretty much wasted if the guest isn't maxing it out.

[GreenEyedMonster]

Thank you both!!