Building my first VM Project

Big Head Tech · February 8, 2016

So a few things here I want to point out. I don't want to hear responses of don't do it, it's not worth it, or build 2 separate gaming PC's, build a NAS etc. Let me give some background first. Back before college my dad got me serious into PC building. I always knew the basics but he helped me build a higher end gaming PC after researching. Then months later with his building skills and my research we built for friends/family. I thus began a side business and began building/selling newer PC's, entered into the used market and after about 500 PC's I stopped because I am just too busy. I currently have the best you can get (4790k 4.5GHz, 980 TI, 1TB SSD) etc and my fiancee's PC isn't shabby either (4690k 4.2GHz GTX 780 512GB SSD). But after I buy a house I am hoping that this project will work. But this is what I am doing.

Dell Poweredge R900's are cheap, they come with older 6 core xeon's 32-64GB of ram and dual 1500W PSU's. They are selling for under $200 so before I invest 5 grand I want to test the idea first. My goal is to buy this setup, 6 250GB HDD's for cheap, and 2 cheap GDDR5 cards. My inventory is low so I can re-purpose those anyway. But I will install Unraid onto the server, use 2 of the 250GB HDD's as boot drives and the other 4 in raid 10 (NAS). Then setup 2 separate VM's and see how it functions similar to 2 gamers 1 CPU. IF and only IF this functions properly, my goal is to do the same thing with 2 3960x's dual 980 TI references, larger HDD's, reuse our SSD's, and 3440x1440 for me and my fiancee. We don't really game that hard but we also rarely see each other due to we both aren't moved out yet.

But I have a series of questions:

Unraid should be installed onto the NAS or will I need a separate HDD for that as well?

Is there anything that I need to plan for (I do know about audio pass through, separate model peripherals)?

How reliable is a VM in general, having never done one before?

How easily can I use the VM to stream to another PC on the network (play the game using the VM's power, but playing from another PC)? Is this even possible?

If my plan doesn't work, what would you recommend me to re-purpose the Poweredge for? Folding perhaps?

Thanks

Beans aka Snaeb

Benergy · February 8, 2016

Unraid will probably want its own HDD, or at least partition.
A VM is as reliable as a normal OS and the hardware it runs on.
To stream games over the network you'd probably be using Steam in-home streaming. This isn't an ideal solution as sending and receiving video/input commands over the network leads to high latency and a suboptimal experience.
Use it as a NAS, web server anything you can think of and can pay the electricity bills for