Deadpan110

Has been a while and I still want to make use of this for my VM's. Please Unraid devs - you will make this old bloke very happy!!

I would still like to see Bcache included as a kernel module: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/bcache.txt This is extremely useful for people that use unnasigned devices and can also be implemented with LVM. It has been considered stable and has been included within the Linux kernel source for a long time. In Unraid kernel .config # CONFIG_BCACHE is not set I struggle to recompile the unraid Linux kernel and would simply like to see this as a kernel module to make things easier (obviously the tools need not be included as not all users would ever need them). Thanks

I second this! I use nginx a lot and this docker is pretty awesome (thank you), but I don't just use nginx as a reverse proxy... Yes I could use another docker for nextcloud, however this docker is small and practically complete (I can completely go nuts with what I want to do when I want). I am unsure of what PHP modules are installed within but it would be total goodness not having to do: docker exec -it letsencrypt apk --no-cache add php7-xmlreader As well as other PHP mod extensions that a lot of PHP web apps would commonly use Keep up the good work!

I am also experiencing the same issue with a Windows 10 pro vm, audio seems to get ahead of the video and stutters with an occasional sound artifact. This is the same for all browsers and media players... hardly noticeable when watching a short vid but anything over 5 mins and the sync falls completely off. Shutting down the Windows vm and starting a Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) that is set with the same memory and CPU pinning has no problems at all (I currently shut down my Windows vm and boot my Ubuntu one when I want to watch Youtube or Plex but it is not the perfect solution). # The following is from my Ubuntu vm (same setup for Windows as I don't run them at the same time) model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz 02:08.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) 02:07.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] (rev a2) I don't use the audio on my GPU as my monitor has no audio out - I use my integrated audio controller. If anyone has ideas or would like me to include more logs, please let me know! Thanks

This could take a while... but maybe it will give some ideas... To start, pre-clear the drive you were going to use as parity (this is a good practice because if it was once was an external drive - any bad sectors will be remapped). Next... (For best results - stop your unRAID array) Basically, swap the drives over... the larger one will be used as parity (currently part of the unRAID array ) Partition and format the cleaned drive with xfs. mount the existing 6GB drive with all your data mount the newly cleaned drive. rsync all the data off the old drive to the newly prepared drive (OCD... run rsync again... heh) use http://tower/Tools/NewConfig and then add all your data disks to the array... I recommend not adding the other disk as parity at this stage Once you are confident you have everything set up... preclear your old disk and simply add it as parity

My solution to this (I also hate Windows but have 2 gaming VM's) is to use LVM which LimeTech have kindly included for a while now. An example: Set an unassigned drive as a LVM physical Volume and create a volume group. Create a logical volume to host Windows (I also have a 2nd logical volume for SteamApps - although not all games are happy to sit outside their designated locations). Periodically cron a job to make a snapshot of the logical volumes... There are then several things you can do from this point (and all will work while the VM is running)... 1: Full image backup to unRAID - dd if=/dev/vgpool/Windows-Drive_snapshot of=/mnt/user/Windows-Drive-backup-$(date +%F).img bs=2048 status=progress 2: Backup files to a location - mkdir /mnt/temp && mount /dev/vgpool/Windows-Drive_snapshot /mnt/temp && rsync -avP --delete /mnt/temp /mnt/user/Windows-Drive && umount /mnt/temp 3: With a little creativity, incremental backups could be performed using compression and a combination of either method if needed Finally, delete the snapshot! You could also leave live snapshots in place and just remove older ones... but the more snapshots you have of a logical volume can impact performance (I use bcache to SSD cache my LVM physical volume- but its not for the faint hearted).

Ever since my early days using virtualization (KVM and Xen), I have always used LVM to provide virtual disks and it was with great joy (and ultimately caused me to purchase unRAID) to see the LVM module included into the unRAID Linux kernel. After various tests and wanting to increase performance, I started experimenting with SSD caching and so tested LVM caching as well as bcache by recompiling the kernel. LVM caching works well and although I have never benchmarked my different configurations, here are the reasons I went against it. [*]It was difficult to find and install the required tools (thin provisioning tools). [*]The 'better' "smq" cache policy is either not available in the current kernel or has been dropped (not entirely sure which) so as such, only the older "mq" policy is available which does cause a few warnings when creating cached logical volumes. [*]Possibly due to "smq" being unavailable, I felt there was no visible performance gained. [*]Snapshotting a cached logical volume cannot be done unless the cache is removed resulting in a fresh empty cache each time you back up the logical volume onto your unRAID array (which I like to do a lot!). Onto bcache... There are quite a few ways to implement this cache to work with LVM: [*]Create a LVM volume group with the SSD and HDD(s) - create a logical volume on the SSD as well as a volume on the HDD then make-bcache to create a caching and a backing device for the virtual disk then attach the cache. [*]Create a LVM volume group using only the HDD(s) and use the SSD as an exclusive caching device - create a logical volume on the HDD and use make-cache to turn it into a backing device, then attach it to the cache. [*]Use the SSD as a bcache cache device and the HDD(s) as a backing device - then use /dev/bcache[#num] devices to create a LVM volume group. Within that list, 1 and 2 can cause confusion when snapshotting in LVM as well as /dev/bcache[#num] not being consistent after reboots (use UID). My personal preference is 3 - with LVM on top of bcache, my virtual machines (2 gaming vm's with dedicated GPU passthrough - thank you LimeTech for making that easy and Linus Tech Tips for the vid that got me here in the first place) feel a helluva lot quicker the more we use them (further performance can be gained by adjusting the cache to writeback but writethrough is default to prevent data loss should the cache device fail). Snapshotting logical volumes to create backup images on the unRAID array is a lot easier as the virtual disk partitions do not need a bcache header (useful in case of emergency). My own virtual machine desktop is primarily Ubuntu but I do have a Windows 10 config I boot into when I play some Windows exclusive games on Steam. My daughter uses Windows 10 on her virtual machine and we both enjoy the performance boost bcache provides in my setup. I encourage others to test this out as I would really like to see bcache included into the unRAID kernel.

Nice, It would be easier if the bcache module was included in the kernel compile too (for crazy ppl like myself to play with) Yes, I will try that... I can live without /mnt/cache being included in /mnt/user (and not included in /mnt/user0), but was curious how it worked... I will try it and report back any findings

Hi all, I am currently testing my setup, I have as follows: unRAID: 1 x 2TB Parity Device 3 x 1TB Array Disks Cache: 1 x 120 GB SSD Unassigned Devices: 1 x 2TB HDD So far I have been figuring out my way around, I am not used to slackware or the inner most workings of unRAID but have had plenty of experience in Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu in the past so will not shy away from things that are too technical. Basically I only use my unRAID cache device for appdata, domains and system folders - only using the Cache Disk and not the unRAID array. So here goes my experimental beginnings... I have successfully added the bcache module into the kernel and have added the bcache-tools. I then set up my unassigned device to be a LVM volume group. My idea is that I am able to host larger domains by using bcache devices backed by LVM logical volumes (makes it easy to flush dirty data from bcache and then snapshot the logical volume if I ever want to create backups and copy them onto the array for safe keeping at regular intervals). All the above sounds like fun and I am about to start testing to see how it all works and how stable it is. My question to the community is about the unRAID cache device... It would be nice if I could set it from using sdx to bcache0 - obviously there will be performance loss with bcache (especially more so before the cache is warmed up). Is there anything I can change to force unraid to use a different device (bcache) as I would still like my appdata and system to be stored in /mnt/cache (and still have transparency with /mnt/users if I ever need it)? TL;DR Tell unRAID to use /dev/bcache0 instead of /dev/sdj as the cache device? Thanks in advance!