**Unraids VR Gaming Experience**

In our latest experiment, we pushed the boundaries of Unraid's virtualization capabilities to create a seamless VR gaming experience for three people running their own discrete copies of the game in multiplayer mode. To achieve this, we turned to the same Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard from our gaming and streaming combo machine.

**Motherboard Selection**

The motherboard was a crucial piece of the puzzle, as virtualization features can be unreliable in UEFI bios. We couldn't rely on virtualization features to get us through this config, so we opted for the same Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard, which is known for its reliable performance and support for high-end VR components.

**Mixture of Video Cards**

Although we could use a mixture of video cards with Unraid's current virtualization tech, it becomes impractical when dealing with multiple identical peripherals like our Vives. Fortunately, this specific card right here exists – a single USB PCie expansion card with four discrete controller chips on it. This means each chip can be passed through to a separate VM without any performance bottlenecking.

**Hot Plug Support**

When passing the whole controller through to a VM, you also get hot plug support. We simply used a few cheap hubs and now each of our Vms can have multiple USB devices all of which are hot pluggable. This feature allowed us to use a single monitor keyboard and mouse to quickly switch between all of our virtual machines for configuration.

**Level One Tax Four Port KVM Switch**

Our next piece of equipment was the Level One tax four port KVM switch, which is super expensive at over $300 but boasts DisplayPort 1.2 compatibility, making it suitable for 4K 60Hz output and even supporting FreeSync and G-Sync if both the connected monitor and graphics card support them.

**Blind Testing**

To avoid any issues with our VR headsets seeing each other's Lighthouses, we put up cloths and used blind testing. Even on a certified USB controller, there were some weird timeout issues with our Rifts. So, to avoid these problems, we utilized this handy blinders feature.

**Configuring Unraid**

To set up a configuration like this, we landed in the Unraid web UI and assigned an SSD cache to run our Vms off of. We also used 60 Terabytes worth of Seagate's 12 Terabyte Iron Wolf Pros, which we threw into an on-raid array where they can safely store personal data off the public cloud or even serve up transcoded media files via Plex.

**KVM Specific Drivers and Basic VM Setup**

We then jumped into the Vms tab to configure our basic VM setup, including pass-through for our graphics cards. This is kind of the special Unraid sauce that allows high-performance gaming in Vms. We also set up pass-through for our USB controllers from there. KVM-specific drivers for Windows were necessary, and once those were installed, it was mostly business as usual.

**Virtual Graphics Card**

To fit three dual-slot video cards and a USB card into a six-slot motherboard, we had to get creative. Normally, Unraid needs an additional video card for itself, bringing the total card count to more than the board physically has. We solved this issue by modifying the primary card's BIOS and presenting that modified BIOS to Unraid as if it was an actual card.

**VR Gaming Experience**

Every one of our Vms is capable of delivering a smooth, steady VR gaming experience concurrently. This is all thanks to recent drops in price, not to mention increasing clock speeds of high-core count desktop cpus and virtualization technology. A huge thank you to Intel for sponsoring this demo and the folks at Andrade for helping us out whenever we got stuck.

**Conclusion**

Thanks for watching guys! If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed or consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso recently we created a two-in-one machine for twitch streamers using unraid and virtualization to capitalize on the high core count of intel's core i9 processors and the results got us wondering well just what other practical applications could such a setup have also you guys were wondering just how we got the whole thing working so thanks to intel sponsoring this follow-up project we are about to boldly go where very few men have gone before and create a triple headed vr gaming setup with the whole thing running off of one tower and actually one cpu as you probably know vr gaming is a demanding workload for both your cpu and your gpu so when we set out to put together a system that could not only run triple a vr titles like star trek bridge crew but actually handle three instances concurrently we knew we were going to need the best of the best so we'll start with the cpu if we were running a single instance of bridge crew a modern processor like an intel core i7 8700k would be a great choice but since we're running three and we need a couple of cores left over for our hypervisor we chose the intel core i9 7960x so you can actually see with all three of our gaming rigs running at about 70 to 90 percent utilization this cpu is still capable of running at nearly 4 gigahertz which means no dropped frames in our game due to cpu bottlenecks i'm afraid to touch this thing too hard it's a little fragile anyway for ram we went with 64 gigs of 3200 megahertz g-skill trident ddr4 in a quad channel configuration and that last bit is important because it allows us to give 16 gigs of memory to each of our gaming rigs with some left over and while very few desktop workloads benefit from quad channel memory when three demanding workloads are hitting it at once well it's a lot more important than usual to have all the bandwidth you can get now for our graphics cards we actually ended up with a mixture of different nvidia vr capable cards ranging from the gtx 1070 all the way up to the titan xp now the point we were trying to make here using different cards is that as long as we have enough cpu and memory resources and they're above a certain threshold it actually doesn't matter what mixture of video cards we use now the motherboard on the other hand was a really important piece of the puzzle you can't always count on virtualization features to be implemented correctly in the uefi bios so we turned to the same asus prime x299 deluxe from our gaming and streaming combo machine now let's look at some special pieces that we needed for this config one of the limitations of kvm the underlying virtualization tech that unraid uses is that if you pass a usb device through to a virtual machine like say for example a mouse it won't be hot pluggable by default and if you have more than one of the same peripheral like all of our vives they would all have to be passed through to the same vm which obviously wouldn't have worked very well for our demo of three people running their own discrete copies of the game in multiplayer mode fortunately this guy right here this thing exists it's a single usb pcie expansion card that has four discrete controller chips on it so that means each of them can be passed through to a separate vm without any performance bottlenecking then this is cool when you pass the whole controller through to a vm you also get hot plug support so we just used a few cheap hubs and now each of our vms can have multiple usb devices all of which are hot pluggable next up is another sort of kvm but this one has nothing to do with virtualization this right here is the level one tax four port kvm switch it is super expensive at over 300 us dollars but it's displayport 1.2 meaning that it is 4k 60hz compatible and apparently it even works with freesync and g-sync if both your connected monitor and graphics card support them now it wasn't strictly speaking necessary but it allowed us to use a single monitor keyboard and mouse to quickly switch between all of our virtual machines for configuration using this console right here finally we've got our handy dandy blinders here you see if one vive headset can see both its own lighthouses and another one you are gonna have a bad time and then we had some weird timeout issues with our rifts even on a certified usb controller so we just put up these cloths now we can walk you guys through the steps required to set up a configuration like this first we need to land in the unraid web ui where we'll assign an ssd cache to run our vms off of and hey did i mention before we've got four cores and 16 gigs of ram left for unraid well we can use 60 terabytes worth of seagate's 12 terabyte iron wolf pros and throw those in an on raid array where they can safely store personal data off the public cloud or even serve up transcoded media files via plex then what we're going to do is jump into the vms tab where we need to configure our basic vms setup passthrough for our graphics cards this is kind of the special unraid sauce that allows high performance gaming in vms and setup pass through for our usb controllers from there we need some kvm specific drivers for windows and then it is mostly business as usual keep in mind though that without three discreet sound cards you'll be relying on the hdmi audio built into your graphics card or in our case the usb audio device built into your vr headset oh and uh here's a special headache we got to experience you see we had to fit three dual slot video cards and a usb card into a six slot motherboard now normally unraid needs an additional video card for itself bringing the total card count to more than the board physically has so we solved that issue by grabbing the primary card's bios modifying it and then presenting that bios to unraid as if it was an actual card yay virtual graphics card for a mainstream board with onboard graphics this step would probably be unnecessary but with a cpu that fits into a mainstream board this kind of performance wouldn't be possible so this was the most elegant work around that we could find and quite honestly it's pretty darn elegant every one of our vms is capable of delivering a smooth steady vr gaming experience concurrently and this is all thanks to the recent drop in price not to mention increasing clock speeds of high core count desktop cpus and virtualization technology so a huge thanks to intel for sponsoring this demo and the folks at andrade for helping us out whenever we got stuck john you rock and tom and eric you guys are cool too so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally joinso recently we created a two-in-one machine for twitch streamers using unraid and virtualization to capitalize on the high core count of intel's core i9 processors and the results got us wondering well just what other practical applications could such a setup have also you guys were wondering just how we got the whole thing working so thanks to intel sponsoring this follow-up project we are about to boldly go where very few men have gone before and create a triple headed vr gaming setup with the whole thing running off of one tower and actually one cpu as you probably know vr gaming is a demanding workload for both your cpu and your gpu so when we set out to put together a system that could not only run triple a vr titles like star trek bridge crew but actually handle three instances concurrently we knew we were going to need the best of the best so we'll start with the cpu if we were running a single instance of bridge crew a modern processor like an intel core i7 8700k would be a great choice but since we're running three and we need a couple of cores left over for our hypervisor we chose the intel core i9 7960x so you can actually see with all three of our gaming rigs running at about 70 to 90 percent utilization this cpu is still capable of running at nearly 4 gigahertz which means no dropped frames in our game due to cpu bottlenecks i'm afraid to touch this thing too hard it's a little fragile anyway for ram we went with 64 gigs of 3200 megahertz g-skill trident ddr4 in a quad channel configuration and that last bit is important because it allows us to give 16 gigs of memory to each of our gaming rigs with some left over and while very few desktop workloads benefit from quad channel memory when three demanding workloads are hitting it at once well it's a lot more important than usual to have all the bandwidth you can get now for our graphics cards we actually ended up with a mixture of different nvidia vr capable cards ranging from the gtx 1070 all the way up to the titan xp now the point we were trying to make here using different cards is that as long as we have enough cpu and memory resources and they're above a certain threshold it actually doesn't matter what mixture of video cards we use now the motherboard on the other hand was a really important piece of the puzzle you can't always count on virtualization features to be implemented correctly in the uefi bios so we turned to the same asus prime x299 deluxe from our gaming and streaming combo machine now let's look at some special pieces that we needed for this config one of the limitations of kvm the underlying virtualization tech that unraid uses is that if you pass a usb device through to a virtual machine like say for example a mouse it won't be hot pluggable by default and if you have more than one of the same peripheral like all of our vives they would all have to be passed through to the same vm which obviously wouldn't have worked very well for our demo of three people running their own discrete copies of the game in multiplayer mode fortunately this guy right here this thing exists it's a single usb pcie expansion card that has four discrete controller chips on it so that means each of them can be passed through to a separate vm without any performance bottlenecking then this is cool when you pass the whole controller through to a vm you also get hot plug support so we just used a few cheap hubs and now each of our vms can have multiple usb devices all of which are hot pluggable next up is another sort of kvm but this one has nothing to do with virtualization this right here is the level one tax four port kvm switch it is super expensive at over 300 us dollars but it's displayport 1.2 meaning that it is 4k 60hz compatible and apparently it even works with freesync and g-sync if both your connected monitor and graphics card support them now it wasn't strictly speaking necessary but it allowed us to use a single monitor keyboard and mouse to quickly switch between all of our virtual machines for configuration using this console right here finally we've got our handy dandy blinders here you see if one vive headset can see both its own lighthouses and another one you are gonna have a bad time and then we had some weird timeout issues with our rifts even on a certified usb controller so we just put up these cloths now we can walk you guys through the steps required to set up a configuration like this first we need to land in the unraid web ui where we'll assign an ssd cache to run our vms off of and hey did i mention before we've got four cores and 16 gigs of ram left for unraid well we can use 60 terabytes worth of seagate's 12 terabyte iron wolf pros and throw those in an on raid array where they can safely store personal data off the public cloud or even serve up transcoded media files via plex then what we're going to do is jump into the vms tab where we need to configure our basic vms setup passthrough for our graphics cards this is kind of the special unraid sauce that allows high performance gaming in vms and setup pass through for our usb controllers from there we need some kvm specific drivers for windows and then it is mostly business as usual keep in mind though that without three discreet sound cards you'll be relying on the hdmi audio built into your graphics card or in our case the usb audio device built into your vr headset oh and uh here's a special headache we got to experience you see we had to fit three dual slot video cards and a usb card into a six slot motherboard now normally unraid needs an additional video card for itself bringing the total card count to more than the board physically has so we solved that issue by grabbing the primary card's bios modifying it and then presenting that bios to unraid as if it was an actual card yay virtual graphics card for a mainstream board with onboard graphics this step would probably be unnecessary but with a cpu that fits into a mainstream board this kind of performance wouldn't be possible so this was the most elegant work around that we could find and quite honestly it's pretty darn elegant every one of our vms is capable of delivering a smooth steady vr gaming experience concurrently and this is all thanks to the recent drop in price not to mention increasing clock speeds of high core count desktop cpus and virtualization technology so a huge thanks to intel for sponsoring this demo and the folks at andrade for helping us out whenever we got stuck john you rock and tom and eric you guys are cool too so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or consider checking out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join\n"