TechnSide2

Just an update on this. I was successful in running my unraid in a VM. I used virtualbox to passthrough the USB drive and also the bootable ISO from plopkexec. Also I popped up a new UNRAID server in TRIAL mode. I had enough spare drives laying around to get enough space to copy out what I had on my original UNRAID server just as a backup. Either way I did a new configuration and assigned the larger parity drive and then my data drives. A parity sync happened and most if not all my data was there. All I can say is I'm glad I copied out the data before I started as it saved me on a few critical dirs. Either way I'm now successfully running my UNRAID server in virtualbox. Good luck unradiers !!

Hello fellow Unraider's , My old PC is a 2700K intel processor. and does not support iommu grouping / pci passthrough. I have an old GTX 960 GPU and would like to use this as my streaming PC b/c the GPU supports NVENC. I explored the VM option in unraid but the performance was not great and the lack of PCI passthrough was a let down, not unraids fault, just my old crappy hardware. So my thinking was let's switch, the host OS is windows to allow full access to GPU. Then run UNRAID in a VM. Well after some googling and YT vid watching I was able to get it to boot on Virtualbox. I was passing through the Physical hard drives to the virtual machine but the problem is the drives now show up as VBOX_HARDDRIVE_###### hhd's instead of the original device ID / name. so all my disks were missing and could not start the array. My question is, is there a way to setup a "new config" and not blow away any of the data I have stored on my 5 HDD's .. I don't have spare hdd's to copy the original data off b/c it's too large of an ammount. Any help would be appreciated. thanks !

I'm new to the Forums. But I wanted to share with everyone my experience with ESXi and unRaid. my goal was to build a NAS for the home computers and also a virtual gaming machine. My rig: CPU: intel i7 7700K MB: Asus H270 Plus Prime GPU : nvidia evga GTX 960 RAM: 16 GB's I verified all settings were enabled in BIOS for vT-d and Hyper threading. 1st setup was unRaid and a windows 10 with GPU passthrough. It worked really well and was very easy to setup. But I was hung up on the purchase price of unraid. So I decided to explore other options. I use to use nas4free but got tired of the upgrade process. It did not have GPU passthrough like I wanted. At least I didn't try it, from what I was reading is that virtualbox doesn't support it. So I was like we use ESX and vSphere at work, plus I'd been wanting to learn VMware anyway. I found the awesome website that allowed you to create custom ESXi installation ISO's but ultimately the only version I could get working was 5.5. From what I was reading on the internet is that GPU passthrough is very difficult to accomplish with ESXi and Nvidia cards. Boy where they right. I never ended up getting the GTX 960 working correctly. Always ended up with error stop code 43 in device manager. Apparently nvidia drivers can detect if an OS is virtualized. I tried all the flags the other sites recommended but never got it working. I ultimately gave up on ESXi and reloaded the unraid and re-setup the windows VM again and man I can't tell you how incredibly simple this was. I will be purchasing unRaid Plus very soon.