General setup questions


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I´m considering starting to use unRAID again after a couple of years using other systems.

 

My server has been around for quite some time and consist of older hardware:

X7DBE with 2 x X5450, 64Gb RAM and 3 x AOC-SAT2-MV8. 16 HDD´s of various sizes, average size 3TB. 2 SSD x ~120GB. 3 Gbit NICs and IPMI.

 

As of now I´m using Proxmox with Arch & Windows VM´s, some Docker containers running on the Arch host. Disks are pooled using MergerFS and parity is done by Snapraid.

Overall the system is working quite nicely, but at times I get tired of cli tinkering and figuring things out. So one could say that I´m getting old and lazy and looking for a convenient GUI and less hassle to get everything working…

 

It seems that unRAID have matured a lot since I last used it, from what I´ve been reading Docker containers and VM´s seems to be deployed without issues. Is this the general consensus?

 

I´ve been running my disks and Arch host fully encrypted, from what I understand unRAID doesn´t support encryption and this is pretty much the only negative I´ve been observing since I started to look into using it again. Is encryption something that´s on the roadmap in a not to distant future?

 

What I´m looking to get out from transferring to unRAID.

1: A more power efficient system. X5450 is not low-power and efficient and there´s a bunch of drives in there as well. I´ve been looking into user shares and the possibility to store all episodes of a season onto one disk seems highly desirable. In order to leave some wiggle room for quality updates, what is a suitable minimum space setting in order to avoid ending up with full disks, 100GB?

 

2: I´m planning to use a 4TB disk for nzbget & rutorrent. There´s no need to protect this data so to my understanding I should mount this disk to the Docker containers using the Unassigned device plugin?

 

3: I only have 2 rather small SSDs. I would prefer to just use them for Docker containers and VMs. I will run 2 Windows 10 VMs. I´m planning to use about the same amount of containers and VM´s as I do today so there should be sufficient space for that. But what about cache drive? I would like to utilize the smallest HDD I have (1TB) as cache drive, is this possible? In order to obtain this, do I need to mount the SSDs as UD as well, or is this considered bad practice?

 

4: Any known issues with LACP?

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I would do some research first to see if unRAID can offer you what you have today with Proxmox in terms of virtualization. While unRAID has matured a great deal virtualization is still one of the areas that needs improvement, in my opinion. I run all my internal infrastructure on VMWare and wouldn't consider moving it over to unRAID unless things like snapshots and api's that can tie in to third party backup applications like Veeam, exist, and they likely never will because the hypervisor used in unRAID, KVM, is not trying to compete with ones like VMWare. Don't get me wrong, KVM is great for what it is, it does work, I run a Windows 10 VM on one of my unRAID servers that I use for gaming, I pass an NVidia GTX 960 through to it and runs like bare metal, but I wouldn't run any critical VM's on it, I just don't have that kind of comfort level with it. As for not wanting to protect your data with respect to nzbget and rutorrent, those dockers typically save their data to a cache drive anyway (not mandatory) so you don't have to worry about the unassigned devices plugin.

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48 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

I would do some research first to see if unRAID can offer you what you have today with Proxmox in terms of virtualization. While unRAID has matured a great deal virtualization is still one of the areas that needs improvement, in my opinion. I run all my internal infrastructure on VMWare and wouldn't consider moving it over to unRAID unless things like snapshots and api's that can tie in to third party backup applications like Veeam, exist, and they likely never will because the hypervisor used in unRAID, KVM, is not trying to compete with ones like VMWare. Don't get me wrong, KVM is great for what it is, it does work, I run a Windows 10 VM on one of my unRAID servers that I use for gaming, I pass an NVidia GTX 960 through to it and runs like bare metal, but I wouldn't run any critical VM's on it, I just don't have that kind of comfort level with it. As for not wanting to protect your data with respect to nzbget and rutorrent, those dockers typically save their data to a cache drive anyway (not mandatory) so you don't have to worry about the unassigned devices plugin.

 

 

I run several physical desktop vm's with no real issues. Of course I keep backups of the .img files, but I would say they are 99.99999% stable. And if there is a problem, I have a standby solution in place for almost no downtime. But not everyone has the capacity to have a near clone of their main server as a warm standby. And I wouldn't trust my vm's as much if I didn't. But for "critical" info, I do production work in virtual environments all the time. They haven't let me down yet. I'm sure they will some day, but so have bare metal machines.

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