Zoroeyes

Hi JorgeB i tried virtio and this did increase the speed a little, with windows explorer now showing around 300mb/s. however, this is still at least half the speed I’d expect given the hardware in use? I also noted that task manager was showing roughly 2.5gbps network usage, so it was better than the previous 1.5tbps but nothing like what I’d expect? am I better using a physical 10gbps connection out of unRaid and back into the VM, via a 10gbps switch, using a dual port 10gbps NIC, with only one port shared with the VM? I don’t understand why I should have to take this route, but I have £1000 worth of nvme drives sat on either side of this virtual connection, all running on the same mobo, and I’m struggling to transfer 50gig files at anything more than 300mb/s ? Seems a terrible waste of potential to me. ive logged a support ticket regarding this too (some time ago now), but haven’t had a reply as of yet

Hi JorgeB virtio-net at the moment cheers

Thanks Vr2lo Ive tried your suggestion and it didn’t seem to improve at all? Very frustrating. I wonder if anyone else has seen this issue?

Hi, sorry for the delay in coming back. I’m changed the RSS queue to 2 but this didn’t improve throughput? Not sure if i also need to touch receive side scaling (enabled at moment) or TSO (maximal at moment) any suggestions? Max throughput I’ve seen so far is 200mb/s and this is nvme to nvme

Thanks for coming back Vr2Io, could you elaborate a little please? I have logical 32 cores in my server and have 16 provisioned to the VM and 16 for unRaid. can you give a little more detail of the settings you changed please. thanks

Hi My unRaid server doubles as a workstation (bare metal workstation which sometimes gets booted as a VM within unRaid) and has a number of NVME drives in it for use on both sides (3x 1tb Samsung 970 pro for bare-metal workstation, 4x 1tb Adata sx8200 pro in btrfs raid 0 for use as the cache drive in unRaid). My intention is that I backup my UHD bluRays on the bare metal machine, then copy them across to unRaid once it’s running (via the VM). However, I’m not seeing the copy speeds I’d expect (only about 150mb/s)? I have the unRaid share set to use the cache and everything in on the same machine. So, considering we’re dealing purely with very fast NVMEs here, can anyone suggest what else could be preventing the 500+ mb/s copy speeds Id expect when copying between machines? Could it be the virtual NIC? It is showing a usage of about 1.5Gbps and it’s only a 1gig NIC but I didn’t think this would limit anything as it’s not really using the network in this instance (is it?) I do also have a 10gig card in the server that I could pass through, but it’s not plugged into anything yet? So would this even work, and if so, should I see improved performance when copying from VM to the unRaidshare? Cheers

Hi Bit of an odd question but here goes. I have a high-end UHD player (Panasonic UD-UB9000) that can play discs but also does an amazing job with movie and music files over the network. Its only drawback is its horrendous interface (no poster wall etc.) for browsing and playing media from storage (unRaid in my case). However, what it can do is act as a UPNP renderer, so I believe it can have media sent or 'pushed' to it and it will play that media (as opposed to browsing for the media from the device's own interface and pulling it from the server). My question is, are there any solutions that can run from unRaid that will allow me to use a mobile device to browse my media collection on unRaid and, upon selecting an item and a suitable UPNP renderer (which should show up on the network), send that media to the renderer? What I'm not looking for here is a way to send the media to the device via airplay or similar, I want the server to push the media to the endpoint, and I just want to use the mobile device to select and control it. I remember I used to be able to do something like 'Play To Device' on my Windows PC and it would send the stream to another device on the network. This would be similar in functionality to that. I know its a whacky question, but I'd love to know about any solutions that other unRaid users are using. Cheers

That looks excellent steini84, exactly what i was looking for (hopefully others too). thanks for taking the time to put it together.

That sounds great steini84, appreciate it and will look forward to it.

Ok, so I’ve been reading like crazy about zfs and I’ve been creating, destroying and recreating zpools to try to understand how it all works. However, like many, I’m not quite piecing it all together. I’ve can create a zpool (say zfspool), I can see what drives it uses and that it’s status is all good. I can set the mountpoint to say /mnt/zfs (which I’m afraid is confusing me a little) but then I run out of steam. Basically all I want to use it for it to group 4 devices into effectively a raid-set and use it for a VM (if I learn more about zfs then I might be brave enough to use it for more things like dockers etc., but a single VM would be a start). I wonder if someone with zfs knowledge would mind doing a generic, idiots guide to the most common setups so people like me could make use of this awesome plugin/technology. These might include: configuring a zpool for a vm, on unRaid, start to finish. Configuring a zpool for a general samba share, on unRaid, start to finish. If all we’ve got to do is swap out our device names and pool names, then I think this would really help guys like me understand how the more general use-cases work in the unRaid environment. I know basic guides do exist (like level1techs), but they all seem to stop at the point where the pool is created, so I can’t progress past that point, I’d like to see someone take that pool, give it a real mount-point and create a VM (on unRaid) using that same pool. Please understand I have tried to read as much as possible about the subject, but not being a Linux guy, even the main concepts are quite alien to me (and I’m sure others). Any help would be much appreciated Thanks in advance

Brilliant, I certainly will, look forward to giving this a try, and seeing what kind of performance I can get out of those NVMEs!

Excellent, thanks steini84, I didn’t realise that had been implemented yet. I had read about it being available in some implementations, but didn’t for a second think it’d be the one I actually wanted to use! So with auto trim, is it ‘set and forget’? No periodic commands etc?

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere, but if I wanted to use this to create a 4x NVME vdev with 1 disk parity (like a raid 5), how would I deal with TRIM and would this become an issue?

Thanks for the great feedback guys, really appreciate you taking the time to comment. It's good to hear that I don't need UEFI boot to run UEFI on the VM so that will hopefully fix one problem. I may also give BTRFS a try (although ZFS is still temping). Either way, the idea would be to regularly snapshot the VM to array storage. I'd love to pass through the NVMEs to the VM for 'bare metal' performance, but I understand the type of drive that I have has issues with hardware passthrough on unraid, which is a shame. As for the workload, I'm a developer that also does some 3D modelling/rendering and CAM (computer aid manufacturing) in my spare time. I've spent so many years spending huge amounts of money on super fast CPUs, ram, GPUs etc. only to see them snoozing for most of the day while they sit around waiting to be supplied the the file or the data they asked for from the slow storage. So when I built this rig I decided that storage was going to get as much investment as the rest, hence the NVME overkill! In truth, no I won't get any payback for having such fast storage, but then, as an enthusiast, I honestly don't care about return on investment. I mean, is there ever a use-case for overclocking a CPU to 6GHz on liquid N2, nope, but we do it because it's fun! All I want to know is that, given the potential performance of my kit, what's the best approach to extract the most of that potential performance.

My ultimate intention was to maintain the ability to configure AMD raid volumes in BIOS, with a future view on supporting those volumes in a Windows VM. To access the AMD RaidXpert settings you have to have UEFI enabled. However, the specific NVME drives that I'm using (I've since found) have an issue passing their controllers through to VMs in unRaid, so this may render that approach impossible anyway. I have another post where I'm looking at the best alternatives that I might use in UnRaid, which (if something is recommended that gives me acceptable performance from the NVME drives, without horrible overheads) will make this post redundant, but right now I'm struggling with which approach to take that will give me the best performance.