tiwing

After a number of months dealing with an occasional (twice monthly - ish) unresponsive box related to Windows 10 VMs on 6.1.9, I've decided to at least temporarily move my two Point Of Sale VMs off the unraid box onto an Ubuntu/KVM dedicated VM machine. i'm familiar enough with the Ubuntu and KVM install , but I would like some advice for moving the VMs from unraid to ubuntu. Will the xml config file "just work" without modification, or are there specific things that need to be changed? Is it as simple as I hope it will be??? Thanks for your advice. Tiwing

Hi, it was a fresh v6 install to 6.1.7 I think. But I accidentally tried to install a 32 bit plugin from an old forum thread and only realized it when it didn't work! i have removed the files and rebooted... thanks. Your other information - all good to know. thank you.

Thank you - I've run the common problems plugin on both machines. My 24GB machine had a number of minor things - mostly 32 bit packages on the flash drive - and a few plugins weren't set to auto update. My 8GB machine had nothing found. I haven't kept a super close eye on log space, but every time I have ever looked it's been 2%. I did have the mover writing to the log, which I've turned off. i've also extended the DHCP lease to 10 days to reduce those writes to the log. Maybe that will help not fill up space so quickly while I'm not looking (at 4am for the logger). Is there any way to check for cache pool corruption? True - but that's only on one of my servers, and I have the same issue with both servers...

I have an always on windows 10 vm running and I use syncback free http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html - daily for over 3 years - without a glitch. But it requires Windows. I like the configuration and options so for me it makes sense. If you don't want a windows VM running, I'm sure the other options here are great, and I'll be looking at them as well...

As many have had happen in these parts, I've had 2 unraid boxes freeze, making them entirely useless in all respects. Power off and reboot solves the problem for a while. One box goes down almost weekly. The other lasts 3 weeks or so. Both are 6.1.9. Both have ~250GB twin SSD Cache Pools wit mover enabled. Both are Xeon W3550, although the 8GB machine was running on an older i5 until recently and experienced the same problem. All are HP based machines, off lease purchase because they're cheap to buy Machine 1 8GB Ram, 2 Win10 VMs using 6GB total Ram and 3 cores. No Plugins, No dockers. It's a very bare system designed as point of sale and backup file storage only. 2x 4TB WD Reds. Machine 2 24 GB Ram 1 Win10 VM using 4GB Ram and 2 cores FTPD plugin Couchpotato and Deluge dockers running, MythTV not running. total 7TB with various 2 and 3 TB drives. Machine is lightly used. I managed to get a photo of the 24GB machine after it froze... attached. Thoughts? Cheers. tiwing.

do you mean memory buffer, on the unraid side (write to SSD), or the VM side? Any way around it that you know of?

thoughts? Any thoughts? Cheers...

not totally sure what you're asking. But consider using the ftpd plugin to set up an ftp server on a non standard port, create some crazy long password, and if you're on a dynamic external IP, use a service like dynDNS to always be able to get to your box. I also use a program called syncback free http://www.2brightsparks.com/welcome/backup/freeware.html?gclid=CNi-7_XikMwCFcxZhgodA80Nsg which works beautifully. If you have the right routers, you could set up a permanent site to site vpn that you won't even notice. I've done it with 2 ASUS routers and openVPN, works like a charm... cheers

Hi, this isn't a problem really, just more of a question why... I am running a windows 10 VM on unraid 6.1.9. w10 VM has 4GB Ram and 2 cores assigned (3.06Ghz Xeon). Whenever I copy large files from the cache to a share, the pattern is fast for a while, then slow, then fast... etc. as you can see from the attached. "Fast" in this case is ~180-200 MB/s. "Slow" is 2-5 MB/s. Cache pool is twin Samsung 250GB SSDs. I have cache drive enabled for my shares and the mover runs daily - there's lots of room on the cache pool. The processors are never pinned at 100% during the process, and memory usage is between 2 and 3 GB and doesn't fluctuation when copying the files. I'm trying to figure out if Windows is doing something goofy where it can't handle reading and writing to an SSD or if it's something with unraid. Thoughts? (sorry not sure why 2 of the same image got attached) Cheers.

I've been playing around with the cache disks, and have found myself manually kicking off the mover once in a while, usually when the cache hits 80%. I use it for most of my shares, including photos and video taken with my phone. Some days or weeks there's almost nothing, and some times there is a LOT being saved. It would be awesome to have the mover kick in automatically when the cache drives hit a utilization threshold (ideally a user input number), as well as at a certain time interval like it does today... Cheers, Tiwing

Hi! Dying to get this working... I want to remove it from my underpowered HTPC box! Everything seemed to install fine, but I can't RDP into the docker. I get a prompt, but then "could not update ICEauthority file /home/mythtv/.ICEauthority" and the RDP session give me a snowy screen... any ideas? Unraid 6.1.9. I also have couchpotato and deluge installed in containers but not currently running. Unfortunately I can't restart the box for a day due to parity check and an offsite backup. Also, Any issues connecting to an HD Homerun dual tuner or do I need to convert to the media build unraid? Thanks

There it is. Yep it was something simple I was missing. Thank you!

I'm sure it's something silly that I'm doing wrong. I've got one 250GB SSD assigned as cache right now. I've stopped the array, and looking for where to add my second 250GB SSD to the cache. I've been all over the web GUI - assume it should be in MAIN but all I have is a dropdown under cache for 1 device. If i remove the cache drive, the drop down changes to none or 1. version 6.1.9. Do I have to specify a cache pool somewhere else first? Is there a plugin that I need? I have a cache only share on the drive now for my VMs, do I need to empty the drive first, remove the share, then add more drives? I thought i read somewhere that you could just add more drives and data would be there. Thanks Tiwing

Awesome discussion (your second link), thank you so much for sharing that. I'm not sure why I was under the impression that the cache pool could only be up to 2 disks, only same size, and the only benefit to multiple cache disks was "automatic raid1... But it seems that you can create a cache pool of multiple SSDs and span them just like the unraid array itself - so 2x 250GB SSDs could be set up to be 500GB, or they could be mirrored or striped if you wanted to (why you'd raid 0 two SSDs I'm not sure but holy crap it would be fast! ) Clearly I have more reading to do. The good thing is that I have my VMs already all running from a cache only share so it looks like I'm half way there. Thank you. I'm sure I'll be back with a few more questions / comments along the way. Cheers

Hi all, looking to get my system set up a little better now that everything is running well, shares are all working like I want, and my vpn is at least operational. I currently have three VMs running off my 250GB SSD that's currently assigned as a cache drive, and all my share saves are written directly to spinning disks. I have a spare 120GB SSD that I want to use as an actual cache drive and have my VMs running on a separate SSD that is not written to as a cache drive. I get how to set up the cache drive and use the mover and all that. I remember reading something about mounting drives outside the array... but don't know if this applies here or is doable and still have the VMs accessible. I also don't think that setting up a cache pool is the right approach here.. ? Can someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks Tiwing

Done. Almost. It went really well - way better than I expected. The first priority was to get the work machine and point of sale up and running for tomorrow. All my stuff easily transferred between cases, and it booted right up. Shares were instantly available. One of my VMs didn't boot - this is the first gotcha. Since this was going into an i5 machine with 4 cores, and coming from an 8 core Xeon, gotcha #1: the VM was assigned to cores higher than existed in the new i5 machine. A quick edit, and it booted fine. There is an error in the logs when both the VMs boot which is a touch concerning, but .... for all I know it might have been there all along. I've never checked the logs. I think next weekend I'll copy the images and create new VMs natively on that machine and see if it works better. But for now, Point of Sale, and the other VM are fine. A quick adjustment to dhcp on the router an the static IPs are exactly as they were. The other machine - a little more interesting. Before I decided to swap machines, I had added a new drive to the array that as of yet had absolutely nothing saved on it. I shouldn't have added it, but I did. This afternoon. duh. The Xeon machine's power supply has fewer power leads than I need, even when removing power from the optical drive. So, since I know there is nothing on the drive I simply did a new config and reassigned the drives with data (from the printouts I did earlier, thank you!). Parity is currently recalculating and all is good. Still, I'll be shopping for a new power supply and will probably move this into my old Antec case with 10 drive bays while I'm at it. So, gotcha #2: Make sure you have enough power leads, and enough SATA ports! (I'm fine on ports and was using a 4 port card anyhow) So, all in all, pretty quick to make the change, and amazing that Unraid just simply works. It's a great night here in Ontario. LOG in case anyone has comments: 2016-03-21 02:29:29.820+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.2.18, qemu version: 2.3.0 Domain id=2 is tainted: high-privileges Domain id=2 is tainted: host-cpu char device redirected to /dev/pts/1 (label charserial0) Cheers

Screen shots taken of both machines. This is great news, I'm so glad I switched from freenas! Thanks everyone. I'll report back after the switch is done with any gotchas along the way. Cheers.

In my very limited experience so far with Unraid, I'm running 3 windows 10 VMs on a single 240GB SSD - 60, 80, and 100GB. Since you will be saving all your files to the unraid storage anyhow you shouldn't need a huge data drive to install windows to, unless you're running some application that uses a huge amount of local cache - I know of a few that require minimum 500GB Windows installs for this reason but it's pretty specialized stuff. I've also been using mine with 2.6GB Ram allocated, although all I'm doing on the machines is light web surfing and normal spreadsheet and word processing, with a little powerpoint. My other VM is a light weight point of sale machine and operates beautifully with 3GB Ram. The nice thing about running on SSD is that windows swap files run pretty fast as well... Someone with way more experience can tell us about the dangers, if there are any, but so far in 3 months of daily 6-8 hour use these machines have been fantastic. cheers.

I know this reply is a lot late from the original ask but I have one answer that might help someone else searching... I do all my scheduled backups using Syncback Free http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/index.html running in a windows 10 VM. It uses task scheduler rather than a service to schedule each backup task, and connects to ftp and other networks. I'm doing an offsite backup via VPN to a network share, and via FTP to another site as well. It has run flawlessly under XP, 7, and win 10 for over 2 years. ... It will also email you logs of each backup completion of failure whenver a backup is attempted. The first backup, ideally, you will do with the machines next to each other connected on the same LAN - that's a lot of data to move over a WAN connection. But after that, the program searches for changed files and only copies what's needed. It's not as efficient as rsync as far as I know, but I don't think rsync will work over ftp (please correct me if I"m wrong!) cheers

Hi all, I just saw the previous new person posting before me is in nearly the same position I was about 3 months ago... wanting to add more storage to freenas, and looking for other alternatives. So here I am. I've put together two unraid6 systems, one for work one for home. Loving it. It's so easy to set up, the GUI is awesome, and so far *knock on wood* no issues at all. Systems: Work Xeon W3550 3.07 Ghz w/ 24GB ram currently 2x4TB WD Reds It's an old HP Thinkstation s20 I picked up cheap. Home i5 3.3 Ghz w 12GB ram currently 9TB mostly WD Reds an old HP Z200 workstation I picked up cheap. Both systems are running multiple Windows 10 VMs for different purposes - Point of Sale, Bookkeeping, Personal machines to screw around with, and a couple of linux test machines - one with Lubuntu / Open VPN I'm just starting to play with. So far I've been self sufficient, used some searching on the forums, but haven't had anything to add or ask... until now. See my thread here... https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=47673.0 Thanks for reading. Cheers.

Hi all, I'm new here. Hoping to get a little help with this. I've built two unraid 6 machines both running 6.1.9. One is at work, one is at home. I want to take the home machine to work, and bring the work machine home, but swap all drive between the two machines so that current work data stays at work, and current home data stays at home. Is it as simple as swapping everything, including the boot USBs, between machines and they should work? Please tell me yes! I also have 3 VMs running at work, and 2 running at home that I want to keep in their respective locations, running off a single SSD "cache drive" in each location. I put "cache drive" in quotes because I'm writing direct to the array for all my shares, not to the SSD. Specs of the machines in case it matters: Work Xeon W3550 3.07 Ghz w/ 24GB ram currently 2x4TB WD Reds It's an old HP Thinkstation s20 I picked up cheap. Home i5 3.3 Ghz w 12GB ram currently 9TB mostly WD Reds an old HP Z200 workstation I picked up cheap. Thank you! Tiwing