BetaQuasi

Yep there's no authentication required on the downloads, just log in using your own google account if you can't get past it Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4

Ahh nice one, the force user works for me as well. Cheers!

My .vmdk maps fine as sda1 on my server. The .vmdk appears as sda in the array screen, with the blue dot against it. I couldn't get write access initially (trying to delete a file said I needed permission from TOWER\root, and I don't use the root account for any drive mapping.) I then found I could copy the bzroot/bzimage over from within a SSH session, and since I store an unzipped copy of each unRAID release on the array, I'm happy with that. As Bob mentions, it's probably the smb-extra.conf and network writing permissions, but I didn't bother investigating further.

Have a look in your UnRAID gui, the vmdk shows up as one of the unassigned drives at the bottom, with a blue icon. If you used my vmdk it shows up as 1.07gb. In my case it was sda1 Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

I like that solution Bob, will be setting that up tonight. Nice and painless! Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

To be honest I wasn't going to bother updating again until final is final. If folks want it though I can get around to it this weekend. Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Re boot - all my releases have that volume label. Re expanding the disk, the vmdk is 1Gb so we could expand the included partition to fill that easily enough. With unzip, if I can get specifics as I'm not overly familiar with slackware or where to put the binary once I have it. Cheers Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Rc15 added to first post - @Weebotech, very time poor at the moment but those are great ideas and will look at including perhaps with the next release Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Just a quick note - not going to bother with rc14. Will do a rc15 vmdk sometime in the next 24 hours, unless the final comes out. Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Sorry guys still at work as of 22:30 (local time here) - this will be a weekend job now.

Yep I'm aware, will be an updated one on this thread in about 12 hours.

haha you are indeed spoiled! We use Equallogic kit at work, not quite the level of EMC but close.. wish I had a couple of units at home!

NAS, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one I really can't see where you're coming from, but as you say, horses for courses. ova's and ovf's are simply an alternative when deploying appliance-style applications, not best practice. If unRAID could be fully self-contained within a virtual disk, then I'd definitely build and provide an appliance.. however as the majority of the content for unRAID needs to remain on a USB stick, I really struggle to see the point. Not sure what you mean by working with the OS after it exists either? I will comment on your last note though - you may or may not be aware that it is not best practice to maintain multiple snapshots of a VM. Snapshotting is only really designed to take a current state prior to running upgrades etc. so you have a rollback point. The more snapshots you have, the more you degrade your VM in terms of performance as the file system needs to parse multiple files (the original .vmdk and then each snapshot file.) This issue can exacerbate itself the longer you maintain each snapshot - as unRAID is static in terms of the content (i.e. just the bzroot/bzimage) this wouldn't be quite so much of an issue as with an actual operating system, but still worth considering. Of course if you have the right SAN setup with multiple LUNs and snapshot redirection, this becomes less of an issue ... however most people don't have this in a home environment. See here for more information: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1009402

We use PXE boot at work to boot a lot of our development ESXi hosts - it IS very cool, but I don't intend to implement it in my home lab. It's only a 2 minute job to replace the bz files in the vmdk.

RC13 up - elaborated on instructions to upgrade in the first post.

I'll go from 5/1 to 100/40 when NBN lands! Will be a whole world of difference lol.. upload is 90% done, google drive appears to be having a proverbial bovine this evening.

That's including the time it took me to just build it, should have clarified but yeah 1mbps upstream sucks lol (more like 768kbps on a good day.) My LTE android is also much faster, but I have no normal phone coverage at home, let alone LTE. The price of living on acreage in the sticks! NBN will be awesome, but it's still 3 years out for my area. Although if I moved 35kms up the road I could have it now... hmmm...

Sorry, I don't see any advantage at all to an ova/ovf vs the vmdk, other than new users having to do a little less the first time around. Unless for some reason a vmdk becomes corrupt, there are no downsides to simply removing it from the VM and adding a new one. Not sure why you would snapshot an unRAID VM.. all the important files still remain on the USB stick. I'm uploading the rc13 shortly... crappy upstream speed means it'll be about 30-45 minutes.

Because folks are lazy? Because it makes it easier for first time users? Because not everyone is at the same technical level? Just a few I can think of. Apologies all, but we ended up having an outage last night at one of our datacenters which kept me working until midnight. I'll get this done once I'm home from work today (around 6-7 hours from now.)

All, I'll upload a rc13 .vmdk when I get home from work (about 4-5 hours from now.) Cheers BQ

@axeman no need to move the vmdk anywhere.. you just shut down your unRAID VM, mount the vmdk in another VM (say as D: drive in a Windows VM), copy both bzroot and bzimage over, then unmount it from that VM. Then start your unRAID vm again and you're done. @helmonder just mount the .vmdk as your first 'hard disk' in the unRAID VM and it will boot from there. If for some reason it doesn't, then just force the VM to enter its BIOS on startup and change the boot order accordingly.

@axeman - to upgrade the vmdk, yes you can either wait until I upload a copy with the new version (I typically make them available within 24 hours of a new release), or you can just update it yourself by simply copying the new bzroot/bzimage files over the top of the old ones in the .vmdk (many ways to do this, I just mount the vmdk in a Windows VM temporarily.) @garycase - theoretically yes that would work. Never tried it myself, but can't see why it wouldn't. In saying that, bare metal systems usually boot off USB significantly faster than a ESXi/plop/passthrough USB setup, approaching the speed of a vmdk boot.

Nothing changes with regards to \\tower\flash, it's still used as normal. All this does is extract/load the core OS from a fast vmdk, rather than a slow, passthrough USB drive. This is essentially two files, bzimage and bzroot. Everything else operates off the USB stick as normal.

Yeah that is a pain, but the google drive hosting is free

Plenty of folks on this forum use the MV8 - restrict searching to the forum and you should find some hits on 5.1 and the MV8. There is a change you need to do to a text file somewhere, but that's about it afaik.