tech101us

So as to not start any flame wars, the intent of this message isn't to pit the loyal Unraid community against other solutions out there. In fact, there are features of Unraid I'm learning to love. However, I have some concerns. Brief history, I'm coming from the perspective of a seasoned VMware Admin in my day job, and having used Proxmox in my home lab for the last 4-5 years. In my homelab setup, I ran Proxmox on a modest 3 machine cluster using old circa 2012 Mac Mini's and a crusty old Netgear ReadyNAS 102 as the shared storage via NFS. This setup served me well for years and was (and still is quite performant). However, I always had some interest in Unraid. I especially liked the idea of mixed sized drives in the array (which perhaps I can no longer do, but more on this below), but even more importantly wanted to get away from so much work on the CLI with respect to Docker Containers. In my Proxmox setup, one of the stacks I ran consistently was a Nextcloud\MariaDB\Redis compilation behind Nginx Proxy Manager for the reverse proxy. This ran fine and was quite performant even on the old platforms. Currently my Unraid setup, which not significantly newer (i5-8400 in a Jonsbo N2 Case and a ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac main board 32GB DDR-4 RAM) is sporting five spinning rust SATA drives as the array disks, and a cache pool of a single NVMe 1tb SSD. Performance for most things seems just fine, though Nextcloud has been a real challenge. I tried a scenario where the Nextcloud Docker Container stored everything but the user data on the cache pool, with user data being directly on the array. Redis and Memcached were configured and seemingly functional. Like my Proxmox setup, I have Nginx Proxy Manager Container setup such that it has two interfaces (one bridged to the host and the second an internal network for container to container communications). The Nextcloud Container, MariaDB container, and Redis container all are on the internal network and not exposed in any way except what is allowed via the reverse proxy). Everything is working, but the Nextcloud UI performance is atrocious. I've tried various solution (i.e. tried Postgresql instead of MariaDB) without much of a change in overall performance. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I've toyed with the idea of just sticking with Proxmox, though I just purchased the Unraid "Plus" license. So I really want to make this work. Note that I recently reworked my array setup where I have four drives formatted as "ZFS" and the fifth drive is for parity. Not sure if this buys me anything (though perhaps bitrot protection might be a thing, but unclear if this works if the the array isn't part of a "pool"). My primary goal with the switch to Unraid was to take advantage of the App Markets and reduce my Admin overhead of my primary home server (leaving my even older equipment for education related labs I can routinely setup and tear down as needed). Truly grateful for any advice, particularly as to what the deal is with getting a working Nextcloud stack on that is reasonably peformant behind a reverse proxy on UnRaid. Currently I've blown away all the Nextcloud related containers and have instead installed Portainer (with the idea that for Nextcloud only, I might deploy the Nextcloud stack via Portainer instead). Other possibility was perhaps a Linux VM running Docker and going that route. Thanks in advance for the help. Am happy to be here as part of the Unraid Community.

Just wanted to follow-up and close out this topic. In the end, the solution mentioned by @trurl was likely a partial solution. I did disable Docker and VM Manager. However, it seemed that perhaps there was some partitioning and/or filesystems on the NVMe drive that I needed to get rid of before I could properly format it as part of the cache pool. After ensuring the drive was no longer part of the pool, and ensuring it wasn't in some way mounted by the OS, I ran a couple of utilities against the drive to essentially zero it out (I think I used blkdiscard and perhaps dd) to achieve this. After doing so, and a reboot, I was successful in adding the drive back to the cache pool and formatting it.

Thank you @trurl. I don't recall enabling docker and VM manager before adding the cache, but it's certainly possible as I didn't add the cache initially. I did briefly have a two drive cache scenario with the 1Tb NVMe and 240Gb SSD (obviously not a good idea). I had tried removing the pool entirely, unassigning the NVMe and SSD, and then recreating the cache pool with only the NVMe, and still faced the situation with the "Unmountable: Unsupported or no file system" message. However, I've not tried disabling Docker and VM Manager and recreating the cache pool, and report back the results here. Appreciate those such as yourself who help out in these forums. Looks like I need to updated my profile to include the specs of my UnRAID server.

Added a 1Tb NVMe disk as a cache pool Selected the option to format. Formatting as BTRFS seems to have been successful, yet the status indicates "Unmountable: Unsupported or no file system" I'm brand new to Unraid, having stood the server up in the last couple of days and purchased a Plus license. Liking what I see so far. Hoping for some help to get over this hurdle. Diagnostics attached unraid-jp-diagnostics-20240222-0646.zip

This debate between VM's and Containers has been at the forefront of my thoughts for some time as well. For me, it's a matter of comfort as I'm just more familiar with VM's and Containers are just new and unfamiliar. I also subscribe to the mantra that VM's are fully isolated, which is a security advantage. However this is likely just my lack of understanding with respect to container technologies. I'm curious in one regard... Let's say you shift an app to a container based solution, and the app requires network storage such as NFS mounts. In my limited experience, mounting NFS shares inside a container required the container to be granted a sort of privileged execution state that is considered by some to be a security risk. I realize this is a new post to a fairly old thread. Appreciate any insight from any commenters. BTW, I'm in the process of transitioning to unraid, so my question here isn't specific to unraid (yet!!!) Thanks in advance...