VM Performance Penalty & Pool Migration

[BillX]

Hi, I'm new to Unraid. I'm currently using purely Windows without Unraid. I've tinkered with Unraid for 2 - 3 times in the past few years, each time only lasting 2 - 3 days due to the relatively steep learning curve. I have no I.T. background, I'm just a hobbyist.

 

I'm thinking of setting up Windows VM in Unraid and use it as my daily driver. The Windows VM will mostly be used for gaming with a flagship graphic card. Will there be any perfomance penalty running it within a VM and if yes, how much?

 

Second question would be for transferring data to the new pool in Unraid. I currently have 9x 10TB drives in JBOD config, totalling at around 50-60TB total data. My plan is to start a new pool of 2x 16TB drives with one used as parity; attach the old JBOD drives as Unassigned Drives; go into the Windows VM; drag&drop files from the unassigned drives to the new pool; empty the drive and add to pool; repeat until all JBOD drives are copied over. Would this work?

 

Thanks in advanced for all the help.

Edited October 8, 2020 by BillX

[Vaggeto]

I'm not a complete expert in setting up new systems since I've had mine going for around 8 years now, but that sounds like a reasonable way to get everything into the array and on parity.

 

If you were willing to risk more time of no parity (assuming you had none before), you could essentially skip the parity until everything is on the array, then add the parity drive and run the parity calculation. That would expedite the process since the parity calculation while you're copying the files would slow things down a bit. Remember you can also do 2 parity drives for more risk management.

 

Also look into the cache drive feature (but only once your system is fully copied over and running) as it will speed a new write to the array and also provide a good area to run some of the other useful features of unRAID such as dockers and even that VM if you're not going to do a dedicated drive.

[AntaresUK]

On 10/8/2020 at 12:07 PM, BillX said:

I'm thinking of setting up Windows VM in Unraid and use it as my daily driver. The Windows VM will mostly be used for gaming with a flagship graphic card. Will there be any perfomance penalty running it within a VM and if yes, how much?

Either put your VM on the cache drive or on an unassigned drive. Either way it should be on a SSD or nvme drive. I have mine on the cache on 2 nvme drives in raid 0