Server advice - what would you do?

[Avalon]

Howay, gis time to catch up! Different storage direction here soon, still in the planning stages... get rid of as much spinning rust as possible, cloud the hell out of non-essential data and only hold personal stuff local (with off site archive/mirror at sister’s).

That's pretty much the balance I struck (must thank your sister ), though for general personal/family stuff i'm OK with encrypted offsite backup to the cloud.

seeing as I am going to be running a full time VM on the machine with windows 10 does it make sense to pin CPU cores to docker/system?
or when i start the VM just un-tick the first two and leave the rest for the VM?

It depends on what the VM is going to be doing really, does it need dedicated cores? Unraid will do a reasonable job of sharing resources for everything, if you need dedicated resources, then you will usually already have a good reason and know you do.

 

[enigma27]

its going to be running a vm connected to my TV so my daughter can play things like minecraft... will have a GPU passed through.

 

[Avalon]

its going to be running a vm connected to my TV so my daughter can play things like minecraft... will have a GPU passed through.

So again, why exactly does it need dedicated cores for that? It's a relatively low end game that'll use a tiny fraction of the available CPU resources, the only time you would normally want to give something dedicated cores (and permanently prevent UnRAID from allocating them to anything else) is if you had specific issues. For example you may do a lot of background media encoding/RAR/PAR work, so the CPU is pinned at 100% 24/7 and the gaming VM struggles. Without knowing things like what else it'll be doing, what the CPU/IO load will look like etc. I can't see anything you've said that suggests an obvious need for dedicated cores, but you know what you're doing better than we do and for all I know your daughter is a world class minecrap player and stays at it 24/7 for a week at a time, in which case i'm not messing with her

 

[enigma27]

So again, why exactly does it need dedicated cores for that? It's a relatively low end game that'll use a tiny fraction of the available CPU resources, the only time you would normally want to give something dedicated cores (and permanently prevent UnRAID from allocating them to anything else) is if you had specific issues. For example you may do a lot of background media encoding/RAR/PAR work, so the CPU is pinned at 100% 24/7 and the gaming VM struggles. Without knowing things like what else it'll be doing, what the CPU/IO load will look like etc. I can't see anything you've said that suggests an obvious need for dedicated cores, but you know what you're doing better than we do and for all I know your daughter is a world class minecrap player and stays at it 24/7 for a week at a time, in which case i'm not messing with her

lol minecrap player indeed.. she is only 7 and begs me to play with her building houses, i just do it..

So tonight has not been a good night.

Server keeps crashing every hour or so and becomes unresponsive until i reboot it.

cant quite work out what it maybe.. certainly isnt heat (CPU idles around 29) and only manage to see one error in the logs hours ago stating something to do with a hardware error on the CPU although i've not been able to recreate that.

just removed the GPU in case it was that and it worked for all of 20 mins and boom locked up again with one core showing 100%

gonne whack a hard drive in it and try and load windows and see if that runs ok.

 

[enigma27]

well im confused

chucked an old hard drive in the machine and installed windows 10 fresh

Machine is running perfectly.. can benchmark blender R20 with all cores boosting to 3.2 with no apparent issues with the CPU..

So wonder why Unraid is freezing??