Do-it-all Unraid build.

[Wyon]

Hi, so I have an idea to combine my unraid server (here) which runs 24/7 hosting plex +a file server +a mint vm, and my windows 10 gaming machine (here) and selling off my old hardware. My primary hope is to lower my overall power consumption and hopefully save a little desk space. The hardware I had in mind to start with would be an asrock ep2c602 mobo, dual xeon e5 2670 and 32gb of ram (maybe eventually 64 if I need it), the gtx 1080 I already have, all the storage I have between the 2 machines, probably a new psu 800-1000w as my current psu is getting older, and reusing the case that houses my unraid server as it should work just fine. As far as vm hardware setup the thought was I could allocate 4-8 physical cores and 16gb of ram to my windows 10 daily driver, 2 cores and 4gb of ram to my mint vm, and let whatever dockers I have handle the rest.

 

While the mobo would be expensive the processors and ram are going for cheap if bought used or refurbished. I mostly game and do light video editing on my windows machine.

I would like to keep my budget as low as possible only buying parts I can't reuse.

Anywho...would combining my systems in such a manner as this lower my power consumption, and would switching from a dedicated system to a vm noticeably lessen gaming performance?

 

Thanks!

-Andrew

 

[VolkovBrad67]

When I was first shopping for parts for my UnRaid server, I was also looking at the Xeons, but the main that was worrying me was the low frequencies since I too wanted to game on it. The E5-2670 @ 3.3Ghz might not be too bad, but I don't know if you'll get the full performance of the GTX 1080. I would expect that for CPU heavy games such as GTA V, you'll get slightly reduced performance than a 5820K @ 3.6+Ghz but it might be "good enough". The virtualization itself doesn't impact my gaming performance in a significant way. The only thing related to that was the latency issue that I had when trying to play Rock Smith, but I solved it by passing through the whole USB adapter to the VM and also using CPU pinning, and assigning cores 0, 1, 2, 3 to the VM and 4-6 CPU pin (I have a 5820K, so basically I assign true 4 cores to the VM). For me, my current setup is good enough to run everything I need on my 5820K machine, so I ended up not purchasing any new parts. I do have a second server though, where I run headless things like GIT, JIRA, Guacamole, but I think if I would use dockers on the UnRaid server it wouldn't be too bad and wouldn't need that other server. Since I live somewhere where electricity is dirt cheap, I don't care about power consumption so I'm fine with my current dual servers setup.

 

Can't you just use your current Unraid Server for gaming ? You already have everything you need to try it.

[Wyon]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

 

For some reason I run into a lot of stability issues running windows on my current unraid server. It handles linux mint perfectly fine but crashes with windows. All I can figure is the bulldozer amd architecture doesn't agree with virtualized windows. I had a different setup using a fx 6100 cpu which had no problems running windows but couldn't game for poops. It had a lot of frame drops and stuttering; not to mention the sound would work great for a few minutes then go into a slow motion garble. I may try unraid in my current machine once I get a spare ssd to move my current win10 install to, and then use my 2x 240g ssd as cache.

 

My idea for building new was to open my options up for the future. When the time came that a vm couldn't keep up with my needs I could build new with whatever the current tech would be and still have a strong running server for various other needs. Not to mention I'm expecting my wife's pc to crap out within the next few months and might have to share hardware with her making the extra cores a little more useful.

[VolkovBrad67]

I have no experience with this type of virtualization with AMD, but it works fine on X99, so seeing you already had that for your gaming machine I thought you could do exactly like I did and convert it to an UnRaid server / gaming combo. I think you can easily convert an existing OS installation to a VM that you can load in UnRaid, so you could then use your 2 SSDs as cache and put your VMs there (including your current OS setup). You would still have options for later, if you don't immediately buy a new Xeon server, you could run everything you need on your current X99 and if you need more later, THEN you could buy a new machine and maybe turn that new one into the UnRaid server, which would probably be more powerful for the same price at that time in the future.

[Wyon]

I'll give it a shot once I have a backup of my current os. Worse comes to worst I can just slip back to my current configuration. Thanks for your help!