I came across a video on YouTube a few months back and was immediately hooked. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJYMCbIbPk
This launched my latest computer project. I am planning to put the finishing touches on the tower hardware this weekend (a video card upgrade) to a month long project of selling old computers and parts to raise capitol so I could pay cash for the new build. I was able to sell three systems and put some of the Christmas bonus with cash I had saved up to combine these three computers into one tower running a single Skylake i7 6700k chip. With a Corsair PSU, Case, and liquid CPU cooler, Crucial RAM, two AMD GPUs, and various hard drives I already had, the system took shape and has been running for two weeks quite well. The power savings from cutting three computers down to a single system will provide savings on our power bill, a theme for this year (cutting expenses to pay the house off faster). My former gaming/work from home desktop, Reba and Summer's shared workstation for photo/video editing and watching educational videos, and the home server I was running in the basement now run from a single system in my office that is so quite, I have decided to put a reminder on my calendar to clean the dust filters monthly so I do not forget it is there.
What is unRAID? It is a platform built on Linux with a great set of tools available out of the box and a straightforward user interface for configuring and managing these tools. It includes support for such modern conveniences as Docker containers and KVM virtual machines. The magic of being able to pass multiple graphics cards and other peripherals at the hardware level to different VMs means each virtual workstation functions as an independent system with full video performance, separate sound playback, and user input for each user. I can even pass an entire USB root hub (or multiples) through to a VM to get further functionality and add USB devices to the VM after it has started up (when the USB device assignment cannot be changed at the VM config level). I use this to connect USB storage to the VM for formatting flash drives or adding other USB peripherals.
The network attached storage function of the server combined with a container for CrashPlan and another for Plex means I can shut my VM down when I do not need it without affecting the backups I host for family all over the country or media streaming of our music or digital movie collection. The VMs are portable, so I can move them to the next unRAID build when this box ages enough to warrant major upgrades or replacement. The software allows me to add, remove, or upgrade hard drives as I need to add capacity, including a parity disk to support single drive failure. At a starting cost of $59 at the time of this writing from https://lime-technology.com/, the software is very reasonable compared to a Windows Server license.
The system isn't without a hitch here or there. I have to disconnect one USB hub built into a monitor and an external hard drive I back up to in order to get the system to boot fully. I still need to track down if this is an OS or UEFI issue, but since I only have to reboot to change hardware, I can live with the issue for now since the hardware is basically finished.
Maybe I can get some photos posted of the system after I give the presentation to my coworkers next week.
