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Agreed - It's worth my time to see if I can make it work though. There are few alternatives to Unraid that offer the kind of virtualization management I need, at a price I can afford. If I can make it work as intended I will be happy to share the build notes as well.

They are 10k rpm drives, so do you think that will help?, I am aware that in terms of bus I/O and ram speeds this is an 'old' system, however for the tasks these VMs will be performing, I will probably us 5% of the total available storage, and most of the I/O will can be measured in KB, So as long as they will run a super lightweight Debian build that's all I care about. The hardware it's self is all top brand enterprise grade stuff, and the ram and drives are all new, it's just enterprise grade in 2014 - but 40 threads @ over 2.0ghz for under $1000 was hard to pass up.

No - They are all mechanical - 3.5" server drives. 2.5" not 3.5"

6.8.3 Thanks again for your help!

A quick question related to this, I'm going to reset the entire configuration - does Unraid have a disk utility tool to automate drive formatting? Or is my best bet just to go to the link for each drive and set the file structure individually, also are there any recommended configurations for Format/file structure for setting up VMs? Data Security is not really an issue on these VMs so I don't need encrypted formats.

oooh - Wow - not sure how I overlooked that - Yeah it is telling me each drive is "undefined partition" in the free space column. Guess I saw all green lights and drive size and thought I was good.

From the main gui window I configured it as: 1x Cache 2x Parity 7x Array I used the bios controller to create an independent virtual disk with an independent disk group for each drive. The drives were all new, so I haven't done a new format on them, I didn't know it was necessary since Unraid identified their size and information properly.

1U Dell PowerEdge r620, 10x 1TB drives, 2x 10-core 20-thread Xenons, 384gb DDR3 - initially what I read said that Unraid wouldn't be able to see the drives through the SATA controller, but that was no problem once I set them up properly in the BIOS, only issue I'm having now is this path issue for VM functionality. EDIT: Not sure if it matters, the Unraid is booting from a SanDisk USB drive on the internal motherboard USB.

Thanks for the reply, that makes a lot of sense. The extent of my bash/shell knowledge is installing dev language packages and libraries and git - so anything helps. The forward slash does exist before all of the paths, I never altered the path, just left them as default. Yet even when I boot into gui mode on the local machine under setting>vm settings all of those path fields are flagged as "! folder does not exist" and if I go to the VM tab there are no options just and error saying "! Libvirt does not exist", libvirt is a KVM thing right? Is it possible the KVM packages are not being installed properly?

I have searched the forum and this seems to be an issue that others have come across, however the fix for their problems does not work for me. Essentially I am going to start with my understanding of how the Unraid file tree is structured and feel free to correct me if I am wrong anywhere here: My understanding is that Unraid creates a working directory in memory upon booting, using this directory to manage all the system files, however the file structure for the array is stored on the data drives? I have limited experience with linux, so perhalps these are dumb questions, but at the root level, when viewing ls -a that is showing me the system hidden files in memory correct? I ask as when attempting to setup virtual machines, every necessary file path is listed as "file path does not exist" this occurs for the default paths of: mnt/user/system/libvirt mnt/user/domains mnt/user/isos so in theory can I not just mkdir the needed file tree? is mnt suppose to exist from the root level? (i.e. #root/mnt/user/etc....) - but if it is supposed to be created on boot, what is preventing it from being generated? technical details: Dell r620 server (384gb ram, 20-core-40 thread xenons, 10TB storage)

I actually figured out the fix, had to update the bios and it worked on the riser card ports. I am having some other issues, but I will start a new thread for those. Thank you for your reply!

Hello, I have a new Unraid instance I have setup on a Dell r620 (10x 1TB drives). I find all the drives fine, however it will not find the network. The server has both a IPMI Motherboard port as well as a 4 port 10Gb card - I am assuming the issue is with the Port bonding settings, however - being new to unraid, I am not familiar with how I should properly configure it. Any advice would be appreciated. Fix: for r620 servers - make sure you are running bios 2.9.0, also depending on the riser card installed, disable port bonding.