bryanr

+1! I moved my UnRAID into a VM on ESXi a while ago, before SK provided such excellent insight as to why you get SCSI errors etc. I'm yet to give his custom ISOs a go, and I'd like to wait until there is one which included UnRAID 4.7 with VMWare Tools for ESXi 4.1 U1. SK - thanks for all your hard work on this. I've added to your other post re: getting better vmware support in the official release. Cheers, Bryan

Sorry, actually, that was a total lie - I don't get drive model / serial numbers or temperature readings. Smartctl did seem to occassionaly be able to read the temperature, but its intermitant. My guess is that spin up/down will also be effected. There's errors in the logs about this, but I'm not too bothered about any of that to be honest - minimal effect on power consumption for me as I only have 4 disks. Cheers, Bryan

Hi all, Sorry I haven't been in here in a while. So far, my ESXi set up has been perfectly stable. The physical box is a Dell PE840 with 4GB RAM. I've got a 'stock' UnRAID installation in one VM, a CentOS 5.x VM that provides 'core' networking services for my home LAN (dhcp, dns, mail, etc), and a Fedora 13 server that has Sabnzbd, Sickbeard and Couch Potato installed. I'm using NFS to mount my UnRAID shares on my other VMs. The only downside I've found so far is that the UnRAID VM doesn't have vmwaretools installed, so when I power down my ESXi server, UnRAID doesn't get cleanly shutdown. Building vmwaretools should be possible, but I need to get some time to put together a dev environment in order to build the necessary kernel modules. In the meantime, I've install vmwaretools on my Fedora box, and I've written an init.d script to remotely shutdown my UnRAID server whenever the Fedora box is shutdown. Cheers, Bryan

I'm using SATA disks, but found I had to change the type of the virtual SCSI Contoller to LSI Logic SAS, rather than parallel. Hope that helps! Cheers, Bryan

Hi, I managed to get UnRAID running in a virtual machine on my VMWare ESXi server with fairly minimal tinkering, so I thought I'd document the process incase anyone else might find this useful. It uses both Raw Device Mapping and USB Pass Through, so it should be reasonably performant and easy to migrate to/from a physical/virtualised platform... and your USB license key will work too! I haven't done any real testing yet, but on an array format, I was getting ~60MB/sec, which seems reasonable for the three SATA disks I was testing with. Comments/improvements welcome - particularly around the faff of creating a virtual boot disk image, which seems like overkill? NOTE: I haven't done any proper testing on this, so please don't be silly and use it with production data! Cheers, Bryan Install ESXi 4.1 on your physical server and enable Remote Tech Support (SSH) To enable SSH, boot your ESXi node and at the status screen: <F2> Customise System Troubleshooting Options Enable Remote Tech Support (SSH) <ESC> Exit <ESC> Log out SSH into your ESXi Host and create Raw Device Pass-thru devices Download Putty SSH to your ESXi Host Username: root Password: <blank by default> # Identify your disks fdisk -l | grep '^Disk' ... Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____ST3160812AS_________________________________________5LS3P8SB Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1600JS2D75NCB3__________________________WD2DWCANM7450414 Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1600JS2D75NCB3__________________________WD2DWCANM7453963 ... mkdir /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/UnRAID cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/UnRAID vmkfstools -a lsilogic -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____ST3160812AS_________________________________________5LS3P8SB mydisk1.vmdk vmkfstools -a lsilogic -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1600JS2D75NCB3__________________________WD2DWCANM7450414 mydisk2.vmdk vmkfstools -a lsilogic -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1600JS2D75NCB3__________________________WD2DWCANM7453963 mydisk3.vmdk # NOTE: you we're using /vmfs/devices/disks here ... not /dev as above! Install UnRAID onto a USB Stick, but with a different volume name Step 1 Plug the Flash into your PC and re-format it using Windows (Right-Click the Flash under Computer and select Format): For File system, leave it as Default For Volume label, enter "ROOT" (or anything else, other than UNRAID!) Check the Quick Format box and click Start Step 2 Download the syslinux tool from the Lime Tech download page, and extract syslinux.exe to a simple directory, for example, c:\. Step 3 Click on Start / Programs / Accessories. Right-Click on Command Line Prompt and choose Run As Administrator. In the dialog box, type "c:\syslinux.exe -ma f:" ...and then press the Enter key. If necessary, change the directory from c:\ to whatever directory you downloaded syslinux to, and change the f: to use whatever drive letter that Windows mounted your Flash on (you can double check the drive letter by looking under Computer). While it will appear to do nothing, the syslinux tool will create a hidden system file named ldlinux.sys on the Flash and make the drive bootable. The latest version and a complete distribution of syslinux is available here. Step 4 Download the latest unRAID Server, and extract the files from the zip archive to your Flash. Step 5 Open Computer, Right-Click on the Flash drive and choose Eject. Create a virtual boot disk image from the UnRAID USB Stick Download/Install WinImage (free trial available) Create virtual hard disk from physical drive File name: unraid.vmdk Save as type: VMWare VMDK (*.vmdk) Select the partition to connect to: <cancel> Put the USB Stick back to normal, for use later for config/license storage Rename USB Stick to "UNRAID" (exactly 6 characters, all upper case) (Right-click the Flash under Computer and select rename) Eject the USB Stick (Open Computer, Right-Click on the Flash drive and choose Eject) Put the USB Stick into your ESXi Host Upload the boot hard disk image to ESXi's datastore Point your vSphere Client at your ESXi Host and then: Select the physical host Go to the summary Page Right click your datastore (datastore1) and select Browse Datastore... Upload the two files created when we made the image of the USB Stick * unraid-flat.vmdk * unraid.vmdk Create your Virtual Machine Point your vSphere Client at your ESXi Host and follow the New Virtual Machine Wizard: custom virtual machine version: 7 guest os: Linux / other 2.6x Linux (32-bit) Number of virtual processors: 1 Memory Size: 1GB How many NICS do you want to connect: 1 NIC1: VM Network / Adapter: E1000 / Connect at Power on: Yes SCSI Controller: LSI Logic SAS Use an existing virtual disk Browse... Datastore1 -> UnRAID -> unraid.vmdk (the usb image we made) Virtual Device Node: IDE (0:0) Mode: Independant / Persistant Edit the virtual machine before completion: yes Add... USB Controller Add... USB Device Support vMotion while device is connected: no For each of your physical disks: Add... Hard Disk Select the type of disk to use: Use an existing virtual disk Browse... datastore1 -> UnRAID -> diskname Virtual Device Node: scsi(1:0) Mode: Independent / Persistent (it should now appear as a Mapped Raw LUN in VM hardware list) Re-configure the SCSI controller that was added for you Change Type... LSI Logic SAS SCSI Bus Sharing: none Finish Finished! You should now be able to power on the VM and UnRAID will boot as normal. From here, follow the usual instructions on how to set up networking and administer UnRAID via the WebUI. /boot will be mounted from your USB stick, so your array config and any changes to the 'go' script will need to be made to the USB stick as normal. Good luck!

Hi, Has anyone had any luck with unraid 4.5.1 and vmware server 2.0.2? I started by creating a vmware guest on my existing ESXi server and installed Slackware 12.2. I downloaded the updated kernel (2.6.31.12) from kernel.org to match unraid 4.5.1. After a bit of fiddling with the .config file, I eventually got Slackware 12.2 to boot using the 2.6.31.12 kernel. Unfortunately, the install of vmware server 2.0.2[-203138] didn't go according to plan and there were a few compiler errors (sorry, I didn't record them). However, a bit of web searching turned up a potential fix at http://blog.mymediasystem.net/uncategorized/vmware-server-2-0-1-installation-howto-for-karmic-koala-x86_64/. After following the instructions there and applying the patches provided, vmware server now compiles and installs, but it isn't working. A 'netstat -tulpn' shows that there's nothing listening on ports 8222 or 8333 - which I believe is where I'm meant to administrate vmware server from (eg. http://<myip>:8222/). Anyone else had more luck? Cheers, Bryan