Would love some help with UNRIAD build

Bedrat2 · December 9, 2019

Hey all,

First I wanted to say thanks for all the help up front, there are a lot of super intelligent people out there and I would love to pick your brains. My goal is to run a VM server that I can run a DCS: World Server, Rust Server, Minecraft Server, have all my Steam games in one place so my wife and I have access to the same library and a PLEX media server for all my movies and TV Shows. I feel for simplicity UNRAID would be best for me to use in this scenario. I have 1 Gig internet service to my home and plan on connecting to the server by 10 Gigabit internally.

Here's what I have so far, I have gotten my hand on an Intel R2308GZ4GC 8x 3.5" 6.0Gb/s SAS bay and 3x 2.5" spots internally server with 2 12 Core E5-2697 V2, 8 sticks of 32GB PC3L-1200L 1600MHz DDR3 totaling 256GB of ram, Optical Drive, Intel Dual Port 82599EB 10GbE SFP+ card, Intel Integrated RAID Module RMS25CB080 with battery backup, 2x 16x PCIe, 8x PCIe riser cards with 1x 6-pin and 1x 6+2-pin PCIe cables per card part number R2208GZ4GC, NVIDIA P2000 Quadro (for PLEX encoding) and a NVIDIA GTX 970 (out of my old machine), 2 1TB SSDs (one for cache the other for the Dedicated VM) and 4x 4TB Seagate Constellation ES ST4000NM0033 SATA 6.0Gb/s (1 for parity the rest for storage).

So here are my question:

1. What would be the best version of Windows to run in my VM to maximize performance for each game server? (I do not plan to run them all at once.)

2. With UNRAID if I planned on adding a Disk Shelf at a later date is that possible with a Mellanox Infiniband Card and still keep the RAID's integrity ?

3. How much resources should got to the PLEX server and the VM server side? (I don't plan on having more then 10 users for PLEX so at most 10x 1080p stream at once)

4. I've seen Linus run a Steam Caching server is it worth it?

5. Is there something better then the NVIDIA P2000 Quadro out there for hardware encoding with PLEX? (I haven't purchased it yet)

My every day computer specs:

ASUS ROG Rampage IV Black Edition
E5-1680 V2 running at 4.5GHZ all core on water
64GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 2400MHz
2x EVGA 1080 Ti Black Super Clock with EVGA HB SLI Bridge
OS Drive 750GB Crucial MX300 SSD

DCS: World Drive 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD
Storage: 2x 4TB Western Digital 7200rpm HD

ASUS XG-C100C 10G Network adapter

Wife's Computer Specs:

ASUS ROG Rampage IV Fromula
E5-1680 V2 running at 4.5GHZ all core on water
32GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 2133MHz

EVGA 980 Ti Hybrid (with gold cooler lol)
OS Drive 750GB Crucial MX300 SSD
Storage 4TB Western Digital 7200rpm HD
ASUS XG-C100C 10G Network adapter

The whole house is wired with Cat 6a and I have a 10 gigabit switch with RJ45 ports and SFP+

Jarsky · December 9, 2019

6 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

1. What would be the best version of Windows to run in my VM to maximize performance for each game server? (I do not plan to run them all at once.)

If you really must use Windows, then Windows 10 would be your best bet. Rust & Minecraft run well on them. I used to develop 'Rustide' which was the most popular Rust+Oxide server management tool back in the earlier days. It's since been migrated to a new project called uMod and there are GUI tools available for it now.

Ultimately

6 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

2. With UNRAID if I planned on adding a Disk Shelf at a later date is that possible with a Mellanox Infiniband Card and still keep the RAID's integrity ?

You'll need to probably check in with the LimeTechnology forums or their support. Last I recall it was only ethernet, no infiniband support but that may have changed with later iterations.

6 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

3. How much resources should got to the PLEX server and the VM server side? (I don't plan on having more then 10 users for PLEX so at most 10x 1080p stream at once)

Depends how many streams you want to run concurrently, if you want transcoding, and if you decide to go the route of passing through a Nvidia GPU to the Plex container/VM.

10x 1080p streams is a fair bit at a time as they could be transcoding. I'd be assigning a good 12 cores in that case, otherwise there are some work arounds such as putting in a GPU to handle transcoding. You can then just assign say 4 cores (to account for library refreshes/meta crawls). Anything large that might be 4K you can put in a seperate library only local users have access to to stop transcoding on those. You can also use scripts to limit the quality differential on the transcode streams and terminate the stream with a message to the user. Theres some good help at Plex Forums on these scripts.

6 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

4. I've seen Linus run a Steam Caching server is it worth it?

Only if you plan to have the same games installed on at least 2-3 machines. Though consider that you can use In-Home streaming to play your library from 1 machine to another if you just like playing your games on multiple machines. The fact you have Gigabit, if its unlimited then I wouldn't bother if its just 2 machines.

6 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

5. Is there something better then the NVIDIA P2000 Quadro out there for hardware encoding with PLEX? (I haven't purchased it yet)

It all depends on budget. The P2000 Quadro is probably one of your best "budget" cards that are widely available on the used market.

Yes there is better, you could get an RTX Quadro 4000 which is twice the price of P2000 but would be your best high end card. Then you get the RTX 5000/6000/8000 but they aren't really worth the $$$ for Plex.

The RTX Quadro 4000 is worth the consideration if you have the budget as it will future proof you for 4K as while the P2000 is a ~20 x 1080p card, the RTX4000 is a ~20 x 4K card. RTX Pascal cards are also have a far more advanced NVENC engine that gives you better quality, so theres inherently unnoticable quality loss compared to Maxwell and older architecture.

Bedrat2 · December 9, 2019

8 hours ago, Jarsky said:

If you really must use Windows, then Windows 10 would be your best bet. Rust & Minecraft run well on them. I used to develop 'Rustide' which was the most popular Rust+Oxide server management tool back in the earlier days. It's since been migrated to a new project called uMod and there are GUI tools available for it now.

Ultimately

You'll need to probably check in with the LimeTechnology forums or their support. Last I recall it was only ethernet, no infiniband support but that may have changed with later iterations.

Depends how many streams you want to run concurrently, if you want transcoding, and if you decide to go the route of passing through a Nvidia GPU to the Plex container/VM.

10x 1080p streams is a fair bit at a time as they could be transcoding. I'd be assigning a good 12 cores in that case, otherwise there are some work arounds such as putting in a GPU to handle transcoding. You can then just assign say 4 cores (to account for library refreshes/meta crawls). Anything large that might be 4K you can put in a seperate library only local users have access to to stop transcoding on those. You can also use scripts to limit the quality differential on the transcode streams and terminate the stream with a message to the user. Theres some good help at Plex Forums on these scripts.

Only if you plan to have the same games installed on at least 2-3 machines. Though consider that you can use In-Home streaming to play your library from 1 machine to another if you just like playing your games on multiple machines. The fact you have Gigabit, if its unlimited then I wouldn't bother if its just 2 machines.

It all depends on budget. The P2000 Quadro is probably one of your best "budget" cards that are widely available on the used market.

Yes there is better, you could get an RTX Quadro 4000 which is twice the price of P2000 but would be your best high end card. Then you get the RTX 5000/6000/8000 but they aren't really worth the $$$ for Plex.

The RTX Quadro 4000 is worth the consideration if you have the budget as it will future proof you for 4K as while the P2000 is a ~20 x 1080p card, the RTX4000 is a ~20 x 4K card. RTX Pascal cards are also have a far more advanced NVENC engine that gives you better quality, so theres inherently unnoticable quality loss compared to Maxwell and older architecture.

Thank you for the speedy response, I looked at the RTX Quadro 4000 and it would be a bit of future proofing by I don't have an 4K content yet, so I don't know if it is worth it to spend the money up front or wait till it is a few years old and get it for a better price. I think I will stick with the P2000 Quadro, unless I find a good deal on the RTX Quadro 4000.

How much RAM out of the 256GB should I be assign to each VM, is PLEX a ram reliant solution? I was going to split it half and half, but if one is going to be more reliant on it I want to make sure that VM has enough.

I will go over and ask the LimeTechnology forums about the possibility of Infiniband support.

I've been watching a bit of Byte My Bits to figure out the NVIDIA transcoding plug in for the PLEX docker and general UNRIAD information, he seems to know what he is doing. Would you recommend watching anyone else on the topic of UNRAID?

Jarsky · December 10, 2019

4 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

Thank you for the speedy response, I looked at the RTX Quadro 4000 and it would be a bit of future proofing by I don't have an 4K content yet, so I don't know if it is worth it to spend the money up front or wait till it is a few years old and get it for a better price. I think I will stick with the P2000 Quadro, unless I find a good deal on the RTX Quadro 4000.

Yeah its a fairly big price gap so it comes down to budget really

4 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

How much RAM out of the 256GB should I be assign to each VM, is PLEX a ram reliant solution? I was going to split it half and half, but if one is going to be more reliant on it I want to make sure that VM has enough.

Plex isn't really ram intensive, it could easily run with 4GB assigned. This is with 3 x 1080p streams and 2 x transcoded 720p streams running. It's using approx 200MB of memory per stream on average. (The rest of the memory is other applications Portainer/Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/Tautulli/Jackett/qBitTorrent/Ombi/Organizr/etc....for automating the whole box)

4 hours ago, Bedrat2 said:

I've been watching a bit of Byte My Bits to figure out the NVIDIA transcoding plug in for the PLEX docker and general UNRIAD information, he seems to know what he is doing. Would you recommend watching anyone else on the topic of UNRAID?

I've seen some of his stuff and its good but its mostly limited to just Plex, and its generally just stuff off the Plex forums/subreddit.

UnRAID forums have guides on how to setup stuff like your containers and hardware passthrough, and Level1Tech forums do a lot of setup guides and such as well for advanced configurations on UnRAID, Proxmox, FreeNAS, etc...

Plex forums and subreddit are good for finding scripts for doing more advanced features.like I talked about in my previous post.

If you really need video then i'd recommend Spaceinvader One. He has a smaller subscriber base but does some quite indepth content on UnRAID, Plex, Emby, and all sorts of other application setups on UnRAID.

Mihle · December 10, 2019

On 12/9/2019 at 4:45 AM, Bedrat2 said:

2. With UNRAID if I planned on adding a Disk Shelf at a later date is that possible with a Mellanox Infiniband Card and still keep the RAID's integrity ?

Don't know anything about infiniband, but:

unRAID does not do "RAID", Well, you can do it with RAID cards, but not software wise in OS, at least by standard. What unRAID does by standard is JBOD+Parity.

Bedrat2 · December 31, 2019

Thank you all,

So here is the update, I’ve been running the server, named HAL (my wife said be careful it may take over the house), for the whole Christmas holiday and been remote monitoring it since we are out of town. I have to say it has been wonderful, I got 2 APC 1500 2U rack mounted battery back ups right after I got the server up and running. Just for safety’s sake and according to UNRIAD I should have 60 minutes of battery time if the power was to go out. UNRAID is set to alert me incase of a power outage.

I have yet to install a VM to run my DCS: Server or Minecraft or RUST yet, I ran out of time due to the holidays and how long it took to transfer all the media over to the server.

So far I have gotten PLEX up and running, but it’s working wonderfully. I have not been able to pick up a P2000 Quadro yet, I won the bid on one on eBay, but the seller backed out and canceled my order and since then we have been traveling and the prices haven’t been good. So I’m thinking about going with an M4000 Quadro to save some money and wait till the P2000/P4000 comes down in price.

The only think different from the P2000 Quadro to the M4000 Quadro is M4000 can’t do encoding and decoding of H.265 (HEVC) 4K YUV 4:4:4, H.265 (HEVC) 4K Lossless, and H.265 (HEVC) 8K, neither the P2000 or M4000 Quadro can do HEVC B Frame support, I would have to go up to an Quadro RTX 5000.

Do you think I would see much of a lost going with the M4000 Quadro it has more ram at 8GB vs the 5GB of the P2000 Quadro and is less then half the price? I do not have any 4K+ media most is 1080p or 720p. I do know the M4000 is Maxwell (V2) base vs the newer Pascal base of the P2000

What do you all think?