unRAID, virtualization, and FM2/FM2+ motherboards and CPUs

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious. A friend of mine got two of these boards, because they came with free RAM from Newegg. He kept the RAM, and sold me the board for the difference (significantly discounted).

So, it's a nice board, I'm pretty sure the A85X has EIGHT SATA6G ports, and several PCI-E x16 slots. Was thinking of replacing my unRAID server's board with this one. (Currently, a Q6600 underclocked in a GA-P35C-DS3R/L/something.)

Now, the A85X board comes with an old BIOS, so it needs a Trinity APU to flash the BIOS, then it can take a Richland. I was thinking of just buying an A10-5800K quad-core Trinity APU and calling it a day. Or maybe, an A6-5400K dual-core.

I actually ended up buying another A85X board, a Biostar -HIFI board, and I bought an A6-5400K to drop into it and gave it to a different friend, for a secondary rig.

If I ask nicely, he might let me borrow the APU to flash the BIOS on my board, so I could drop in a Richland.

I also bought three FM2+ A55M MSI boards and three A4-6300 APUs to drop into those boards.

So assuming I want to use my A85X board in my unRAID server at some point, and not game on it, what would be my best course of action?

The reason that I'm asking is, the A10-5800K is still in-stock at Newegg, but their supply of FM2 APUs is dwindling fast, and they no longer stock the A10-6800K Richland APU.

 

[Burpo]

http://www.amazon.com/AMD-A10-Series-Desktops-A10-6800K-AD680KWOHLBOX/dp/B00CPLGGXM/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt

 

[VirtualLarry]

Thanks Burpo. Unfortunately, that's a bit more expensive than the $99.99 for the A10-5800K at Newegg. Like 30% more. And I don't think that the A10-6800K is 30% faster. Plus, I would need to borrow or buy a Trinity APU to flash the BIOS on that board.

Thanks for letting me know that I still have that option, though, if I wanted to spend the extra on it.

Is there any difference in power-consumption, both at load and idle, between Trinity and Richland?

 

[maddogmcgee]

http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1169

 

[AtenRa]

Just take the A10-5800K, since you will not OC you will not see any difference in performance and power.
Just disable turbo and play with voltages and bios power/vrm settings to find the lowest power consumption.

But why dont you sell the board and buy a new FM2+ and A8-7600 ??

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just take the A10-5800K, since you will not OC you will not see any difference in performance and power.
Just disable turbo and play with voltages and bios power/vrm settings to find the lowest power consumption.

But why dont you sell the board and buy a new FM2+ and A8-7600 ??

Well, for one, who is going to want to buy a non-FM2-"plus" board? And where am I going to find a board with eight SATA6G ports?

 

[AtenRa]

I dont know how much you bought that board, but there are X88 boards with 8-sata.

Anyway as i said, just get the A10-5800K and you will be just fine for what you want the system.

 

[cbn]

I dont know how much you bought that board, but there are X88 boards with 8-sata.

I remember one time when only one or two A88X boards had eight SATA 6 Gbps, but now most of the ones listed at Newegg do --> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...97&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30

But is there any good reason to use FM2+ over FM2 for unraid?

P.S. One thing I was interested last year in was using Virtualization for UNRaid --> http://lime-technology.com/qa-with-tom-on-unraid-virtualization/, but I haven't got around to experimenting with it. Is there anything about FM2+ that lends itself to working better with Virtualization than FM2?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I remember one time when only one or two A88X boards had eight SATA 6 Gbps, but now most of the ones listed at Newegg do --> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...97&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30

But is there any good reason to use FM2+ over FM2 for unraid?

P.S. One thing I was interested last year in was using Virtualization for UNRaid --> http://lime-technology.com/qa-with-tom-on-unraid-virtualization/, but I haven't got around to experimenting with it. Is there anything about FM2+ that lends itself to working better with Virtualization than FM2?

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39612.0

I'm still on a beta of unRAID 5. I had no idea that they were expanding into virtualization support. This is very exciting! I could run a Windows 7, and a Linux Mint VM, on the same server as my unRAID / storage. Very cool.

As far as virtualization goes, with AMD... is FM2+ any better at it than FM2? Any difference between Trinity, Richland, and Kaveri? If Kaveri has significantly better virtualization support, then I would consider selling the A85X board, and getting an A88X and a Kaveri.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6

 

[cbn]

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39612.0

I'm still on a beta of unRAID 5. I had no idea that they were expanding into virtualization support. This is very exciting! I could run a Windows 7, and a Linux Mint VM, on the same server as my unRAID / storage. Very cool.

There were a lot of interesting ideas in that post including using Virtual appliance (for SteamOS) and localized virtual desktop (see quote below) for editing photo and video. Looking forward to learning more about this as time goes by.

Coming from the enterprise virtualization industry, I always struggled with the value of traditional VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure). The primary reason was that you had to sacrifice user experience to get the benefits of virtualization for end-user computing. A simpler way to say it: remote graphics, while handy in a pinch or while away from home, is certainly not the most enjoyable experience for "all-the-time" computing. This is where unRAID 6 stands alone with localized virtual desktops. LVDs allow us to do two things:

1 - leverage local input / display connectivity to use our NAS hardware as a high-performance desktop
2 - leverage the performance of local networking to stream a high-quality desktop experience to various other devices in our homes

With LVDs, we can create digital art, edit photos/videos, and enjoy 3D gaming, all from the same system that stores and protects our data.

P.S. Regarding the mention of using host GPU and passthrough GPU (in Virtual Larry's link), is this because virtualizing a single GPUs for multiple VMs is not supported yet? I have so much to learn.

 

[zir_blazer]

You may want to make sure than you have AMD-Vi/IOMMU support since one of the possible ways to use unRAID is to have it inside a VM and do PCI Passthrough of the SATA Controller.

GPU virtualization is a very recent and very expensive enterprise feature, nVidia was providing it with their GRID line for "cloud gaming". There is a mainstream alternative: XenGT. It should be mainlined into the Linux Kernel, QEMU, and KVM/Xen in a few more months, but there is a Preview version available for Ubuntu if you want to rush. However, it requires a Haswell/Broadwell processor with IGP. It also gives me the chance to see the tears of anyone who through that saving 20-30 U$D on an IGP-less Xeon E3 was worth it then figure out that they will miss a killer feature for virtualization, heh.

 

[cbn]

You may want to make sure than you have AMD-Vi/IOMMU support since one of the possible ways to use unRAID is to have it inside a VM and do PCI Passthrough of the SATA Controller.

Here is the definition I found for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#I.2FO_MMU_virtualization_.28AMD-Vi_and_Intel_VT-d.29

I/O MMU virtualization (AMD-Vi and Intel VT-d)
See also: IOMMU § Virtualization

An input/output memory management unit (IOMMU) allows guest virtual machines to directly use peripheral devices, such as Ethernet, accelerated graphics cards, and hard-drive controllers, through DMA and interrupt remapping. This is sometimes called PCI passthrough.[43]

An IOMMU also allows operating systems to eliminate bounce buffers needed to allow themselves to communicate with peripheral devices whose memory address spaces are smaller than the operating system's memory address space, by using memory address translation. At the same time, an IOMMU also allows operating systems and hypervisors to prevent buggy or malicious hardware from compromising memory security.

Both AMD and Intel have released their IOMMU specifications:

AMD's I/O Virtualization Technology, "AMD-Vi", originally called "IOMMU".[44]
Intel's "Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O" (VT-d),[45] included in most high-end (but not all) Nehalem and newer Intel processors.[46]

In addition to the CPU support, both motherboard chipset and system firmware (BIOS or UEFI) need to fully support the IOMMU I/O virtualization functionality in order for it to be actually usable. Only the PCI or PCI Express devices supporting function level reset (FLR) can be virtualized this way, as it is required for reassigning various device functions between virtual machines.[47][48] All conventional PCI devices routed behind a PCI/PCI-X-to-PCI Express bridge can be assigned to a guest virtual machine only all at once; PCI Express devices have no such restriction. If a device to be assigned does not support Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI), it must not share interrupt lines with other devices for the assignment to be possible.[49]

And a list of IOMMU supporting hard hardware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardware

^^^^ From the looks of that source of info AMD is supporting IOMMU on lower end hardware than Intel.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You may want to make sure than you have AMD-Vi/IOMMU support since one of the possible ways to use unRAID is to have it inside a VM and do PCI Passthrough of the SATA Controller.

As I read it, the docs for unRAID v6.x indicate that "unRAID inside a VM, using IOMMU passthrough" is unnecessary. Using Linux kernel-native KVM VM support, unRAID Linux itself is the "host OS", and then you can load "Guest OS" images inside it.

 

[cbn]

For unRAID with Virtualization, this is what I would like to do (or at least test) at some point:

unRAID (as host OS), Windows 8.1 (or 10), Linux Mint 17 all on one box. Then stream games to a smaller computer connected to a TV. How would the performance compare to running Windows natively and then streaming? Or how about playing games (without streaming) on Windows in a VM?

Maybe this helps me determine whether to run Windows or unRAID as the host OS?

But if running unRAID as a VM how does that affect the storage performance?

 

[cbn]

P.S. Pretty soon Linux, SteamOS, (as well as Mac) will be able to host games for streaming. So that could factor into some folks decision on which OS to select for the host. I'd imagine there might be cases where being able to use Windows (for some non gaming activity) and then stream games from Linux might be a desirable thing to do.

 

[zir_blazer]

^^^^ From the looks of that source of info AMD is supporting IOMMU on lower end hardware than Intel.

That's relative. Since I dived into the IOMMU trend some years ago, the main issue is not Hardware support, is Firmware support. You may have a very nice Motherboard and proper Hardware, but a buggy BIOS that makes Linux Kernel panic when it attempts to use the IOMMU.
The fact that it is Firmware means that if the manufacturer cares about it, it can fix it with a BIOS update. So far, a few generations ago it was a no-no. During the last two years, Firmware support for VT-d on the Haswell platform was much improved, but on AMD side I don't know.

As I read it, the docs for unRAID v6.x indicate that "unRAID inside a VM, using IOMMU passthrough" is unnecessary. Using Linux kernel-native KVM VM support, unRAID Linux itself is the "host OS", and then you can load "Guest OS" images inside it.

Yup, that can also work. But depending on who is doing the setup, they may prefer to do something like using Xen as Type I Hypervisor and have unRAID inside a VM itself, instead of letting it be on bare metal and using KVM for other VMs. In this case, you DO need IOMMU.
If anything, for an all-in-one box where you want to use the same system for all your needs, including storage and gaming simultaneously, you need IOMMU anyways since chances are that you will do VGA Passthrough to a Windows VM.


Also, if you're interesed in Xen, you may want to read my guide (Its an updated version than the one that I posted in this Thread, since no one replied I didn't bothered updating it).