Unraid 6 now rolls in docker and QEMU? Easy VGA passthrough?

[TType85]

This may be old news but it is new to me. I was browsing around today I found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJYMCbIbPk

I didn't know unRaid was ever updated let alone they added some neat stuff. All of which you can do on a linux server for free, but it is in a neat package.

I am going to give it a try this weekend with a GTX 760 and GTX 970. I already threw it on a test server, installed plex in a docker container and it works great.

 

[Rody]

I read a lot of disparaging remarks in the comments, but for the guys that want to set something up fast this is actually pretty cool, and you don't have to be very computer savvy.

I have been thinking of doing this for my boys for a while, should save a little bit of cash, be plenty fast for what they do and in the end save a bit of power.

 

[Vengance_01]

Thats really cool. If this was out a bit ago, I would have done this for me and the Wife.

 

[bman212121]

If it works well then it's definitely worth the money. I've tried to do this style setup on my own before. Back when I did it once of the suggested methods to make it work required flashing the firmware on your video card. Needless to say I didn't do that. I had XP or something up and running but it was flaky at best.

I already have a use case in mind for a setup like this, but I'm not sure if it has all of the pieces to want to make the transition. Linux is generally poor at performance for SMB shares, but if you setup a VM to do the sharing and the backend is up to par you should be able to get good transfer speeds out of it. Then being able to use one set of hardware for everyday and having an older GPU in the system for when you need temp access to a 2nd pc would fantastic.

Hyper-V, ESX, and virtualbox have solutions that can do hardware accelerated VMs, but I don't think I've figured out a way to get the console access for VMs that are separate instances from the main console. That's what I'm waiting for but since those are designed around servers in a room with remote thin clients I don't see them pursuing it. Although I just thought of a possible test scenario. Run Virtualbox with hardware acceleration, then use Steam's in home streaming to get the output onto a slow old pc that isn't capable of running the game. Probably not going to have the performance unRaid's solution, but it could possibly be fast enough while only needed a single GPU.

Thanks for the info TType85 as I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Next time I go to refresh some of my server components this could fill a niche that I want without requiring two pcs to be built while one of them is unused most of the time.

 

[TType85]

I have a new (to me) workstation on the way that I am going to try this with.

This system will have:
Asus ASUS Z9PE-D8 with 2 E5-2620 (upgrading to e5-2670's when I find the right price)
64GB DDR3 ECC ram
2x 480GB SSD
2x 3TB SATA
1 GTX 970
1 GTX 760
1 USB3 card (going to try and pass that through to one of the VM's)
2x Windows 10 VM's

Work has been getting in the way of trying it out but I will get it done. The question is going to come down to audio. I hear there are some issues with USB headsets, but we will see.