Ok so...I did a thing.
Ever since I got my new server setup (which as been working very well), I've been staring at my everyday PC (see
here) and it's pretty much been sitting idle for months (i just RDP into it from work). I considered selling this build but I put a lot of work into and I just flat out love it. So I got to thinking, how can I best make sure of these hardware resources.
So over the past few days I've been testing out the scenario of turning this PC into an All-in-One Unraid Storage server + Everyday Windows 10 VM daily driver with passed through hardware. If all went well, I'd migrate my spinners and NVMe disks over to this box (thinking a little jbod case will do the trick).
Well, so far that testing has gone very well.
Step 1: Create a Windows 10 VM with one Threadripper die (8c/16t), one 1080Ti, NVMe controller, and USB controller passed through to it. That has been a success. The Windows 10 VM works perfectly with the passed through hardware and with a PCIe USB controller passed through (which is also connected to the front panel of my case) the VM acts just like my bare metal PC did (just minus 16 threads).
Step 2: Pass the second 1080Ti through to my Plex docker container. This requires the installation of the LSIO Nvidia plugin, and two scripts to both remove the 2 simultaneous transcode limit on the 1080Ti and to add NVDEC decode support until Plex adds it. This also was pretty easy to setup and get working. As you can see from the attached screenshot (just for kicks, I won't be transcoding 4K) I was able to get six simultaneous 4K HDR10 file transcoding down to 4Mbps 720p quality at once with the GPU at less than 50% usage while CPU usage was basically nothing. A subsequent test had 5 x265 HEVC 1080p files transcoding simultaneously (must more of a real world application) and the GPU was at 10% usage. The 1080Ti with the stream limit removed is basically the same card as a Quadro P6000
.
I still have a little more testing to do but suffice to say things are looking good for me to migrate all my storage into this box and run all my network services + a daily driver Windows 10 VM from the same box.
So yes, I may wind up selling the new server I just built
. Call me crazy...I won't deny it.