Migrating from desktop to unraid.

[Wyon]

So I recently moved my gaming PC into my unraid server and sold off the extra parts. I've had way more performance degradation than I expected in games. The old system was a 8600k with 16gb of ddr4 3200 ram. My VM has an Intel 660p nvme ssd, 1080ti, and usb 3.0 expansion card passed through with 6 physical cores of a 2920x and 16gb of ram assigned.

Playing at 1440p I went from ~100fps to ~80fps on ffxiv. It'll dip down into the 30fps range in congested areas.

Destiny 2 took a similar hit going from a steady 120+fps to barely holding 60. Which seems extreme from what I've experienced in the past.

 

What I'm wondering is if this is to be expected switching from bare metal to vitalization or is it compounded by the change in CPU also? Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[enigmakahn]

That sounds about right for a performance drop, but out of curiosity why did you switch to a VM for your daily driver?

[Wyon]

1 hour ago, enigmakahn said:

That sounds about right for a performance drop, but out of curiosity why did you switch to a VM for your daily driver?

Space and power consumption mostly. While it only brought it down a little it did help. Plus by selling off the parts I've actually come out ahead money-wise.

[Majinhoju]

I've heard it said that threadrippers aren't very good for gamiing, could that be adding to your gaming bottle neck?  If you have another harddrive/ssd, I'd slap in another drive, keep it outside you unraid array and install windows on it to see if your VM is actually bottlenecking you. 

[Wyon]

2 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

I've heard it said that threadrippers aren't very good for gamiing, could that be adding to your gaming bottle neck?  If you have another harddrive/ssd, I'd slap in another drive, keep it outside you unraid array and install windows on it to see if your VM is actually bottlenecking you. 

I really need to try that. I'll have to wait until the family is gone so no one can fuss about Plex being down lol

[phoenixflower]

Heya there Wyon,

So TR4 is definitely a weird place to be in a non-enterprise/workstation environment.  Zen++ definitely does not have the best single core IPC but can certainly be accounted for in various scenarios.  The first thing to denote when using Ryzen is that Zen++ is very sensitive to RAM speeds.  The first thing to consider is what kit your using with your threadripper and if you should tighten the timings or try for a faster RAM OC.

 

I have a 2950x, a 2700x, and 3900x.  The 2950x has the worst performance of all of them in gaming work loads (it's in my ingest station/services platform).  The 2920x has a little bit of a better chance because of the reduced amount of cores thus more headroom for overclocking.

 

Virtualization on modern platform only has a 2-5% performance hit.  You wouldn't see much better numbers on bare metal.  As Linux has a better scheduler then Windows 10.  You may even see worse numbers on Bare Metal until that problem is fully resolved with the Windows NT kernel and how it interacts with Numa nodes.

 

 

The second thing you'll probably want to do is not choose "host" for CPU passthrough as threadripper has the same "stability" associated with it as EYPC CPUs.  Usually choosing Penryn with hardware pass-through options or simply choosing something like Haswell will make Windows think it's on a different system and may add some uplift to your performance.

 

The last thing you'll probably want to do is try you installation with Proxmox VE 6.0 as it has much better support in different aspects.  It has the full support of the Debian Team alongside the Vienna team that directly supports Proxmox.  UnRaid is certainly a nicer UI but it's not as feature rich.

 

I run my 3900x with Proxmox VE 6.0 as my daily driver with Windows 10, Mac OS X and various Linux Distros installed.  I've ran bare metal and in the VM scenario and I literally don't notice a difference other then not caring when Windows decides to BSOD because of a NVIDIA graphics update.  I also use the virtio Drivers developed by Redhat with Proxmox and haven't had a reason to switch over to PCI-E passthrough with an NVME SSD.  I use 64 GB of RAM alongside ZFS to literally just put stuff in memory though.

 

If you need help tuning it, I can provide some tips but honestly for a gaming workload the 8600k just wipes the floor with threadripper.  The TR4 socket in general was designed as a services platform with some emphasis on workstation workloads.  The whole gaming with Threadripper thing was never an emphasis on the platform.

[NelizMastr]

16 minutes ago, phoenixflower said:

I run my 3900x with Proxmox VE 6.0 as my daily driver with Windows 10, Mac OS X and various Linux Distros installed.  I've ran bare metal and in the VM scenario and I literally don't notice a difference other then not caring when Windows decides to BSOD because of a NVIDIA graphics update.  I also use the virtio Drivers developed by Redhat with Proxmox and haven't had a reason to switch over to PCI-E passthrough with an NVME SSD.  I use 64 GB of RAM alongside ZFS to literally just put stuff in memory though.

You have some balls. Proxmox 6 is still in beta. My Proxmox server is a 2650v2 Xeon with 64gigs as well and a RAID5 SSD set. Is 6.0 notably better than 5.x?

[phoenixflower]

Proxmox 6.0 is no longer in Beta, it was released in late July.

[NelizMastr]

2 minutes ago, phoenixflower said:

Proxmox 6.0 is no longer in Beta, it was released in late July.

Please quote when you respond to someone

 

But yes, I see now. They hadn't updated the download page yet. But again, is it notably better? If so, I'll upgrade my host later this week.

[phoenixflower]

3 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

You have some balls. Proxmox 6 is still in beta. My Proxmox server is a 2650v2 Xeon with 64gigs as well and a RAID5 SSD set. Is 6.0 notably better than 5.x?

 

I also ZFS Z2 (very akin to Hardware RAID6) for all of my raiding needs  

Proxmox 6.0 alongside the Linux 5.xx kernel brought some much needed improved VFIO improvements. 

 

What can I say, I wanted ZFS with UEFI booting.  I have dual GPUs in the system to test various loads while developing.  I boot Proxmox off a PCI-E x1 GPU (https://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-GeForce-Profile-Graphic-ZT-71304-20L/dp/B01E9Z2D60/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=pci-e+x1+gpu&qid=1565178900&s=gateway&sr=8-2)

 

[NelizMastr]

Just now, phoenixflower said:

 

I also ZFS Z2 (very akin to Hardware RAID6) for all of my raiding needs  

Proxmox 6.0 alongside the Linux 5.xx kernel brought some much needed improved VFIO improvements. 

 

What can I say, I wanted ZFS with UEFI booting.  I have dual GPUs in the system to test various loads while developing.  I boot Proxmox off a PCI-E x1 GPU (https://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-GeForce-Profile-Graphic-ZT-71304-20L/dp/B01E9Z2D60/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=pci-e+x1+gpu&qid=1565178900&s=gateway&sr=8-2)

 

Good to know, thanks!

[phoenixflower]

1 minute ago, NelizMastr said:

Please quote when you respond to someone

 

But yes, I see now. They hadn't updated the download page yet. But again, is it notably better? If so, I'll upgrade my host later this week.

I think the installation process is easier because the way I installed Proxmox 5.4 was installing Debian Stretch with ZFS and then installing Proxmox on top of it.  Now it's just the install USB, it's so much less stressful.

 

There's a bunch of quality of life things like preventing  people from using Copy on Write backends when using a ZFS storage volume and making sure you can use Containers OOB with ZFS (this was not true in 5.4).  If you have performance VMs you will have to modify your config files a bit.  You'll need to specify kernel-irqchip=on due to the QEMU default being switched to split for MxGPU solutions.

 

There's also an upgrade tool to prevent bad stuff from hapening