Hi,

Am I the only one here wanting to use his storage server to be used with VMWare and configure Datastore ? As I can see, the only way to use UnRAID with VMWare is with NFS. And do not seems to be very stable as VMWare lost the disk often.

So is there any way to use (with stability and speed) UnRAID for VMWare Datastore ?

P.S.: I'm curently in the process of buying 10Gb NIC between UnRAID and my 2 ESXi

For me, its too slow and doesn't have enough resiliency.  You are basically storing your VMs on a single disk.

 

That being said, I haven't tried out any of the ZFS stuff in unRAID.

I'd love to have this functionality too.  I have found it's just not reliable enough, dropped datastores and locked up VMs.  No idea if this is VMware's problem or UnRAIDs, but whatever it is, it's not very usable as it sits today for me.  

 

I'd be fine with iSCSI or NFS.  My concern isn't really speed, but I'd be storing my VMFS/NFS partitions on an SSD mirror cache pool, so I don't really need the speed of multi-disk, a single drive will produce plenty of IOPS for what I need.  

 

Any plans/progress on looking at this use case?

14 minutes ago, Overtaxed said:

Any plans/progress on looking at this use case?

Curently, my project is on pause. I must work on an issue on one of my ESX before.

But the future plan is a mix of these two post:

 

Updating to 6.9rc2, install iSCSI plugin

 

But before, create a raid disk to share it via iSCSI (Not sure if it will works in block filesystem)

 

This will be my plan for future.

If you try, keeps me updated

 

24 minutes ago, Janus said:

This will be my plan for future.

The most easy way would be to create a RAID0 with your onboard controller since most of the onboard controllers are capable to do that and then share the disk with iSCSI.

 

You also know that there is a Plugin for iSCSI and you don't have to actually create custom images.

On 2/8/2021 at 6:29 AM, Janus said:

 As I can see, the only way to use UnRAID with VMWare is with NFS. And do not seems to be very stable as VMWare lost the disk often.

So is there any way to use (with stability and speed) UnRAID for VMWare Datastore ?

 

Keep advocating for Unraid R&D to implement NFS v4. That's your best bet. (Or go iSCSI).

I´m using Unraid as an datastore for VM´s, first i was sharing nativly from unraid (nfsv3) to vmware. That was an unstable mess with more or less all machines locked up each day. Now i have installed erichough/nfs-server in an docker and share my shares from that docker over nfsv3 to vmware. This works better, but still sometimes it will lock up my vm´s.

I came from an Synology station where i shared over nfsv3, never had a problem. 

 

I really do hope NFS v4 will be available soon, or is iSCSI the only way forward? The biggest problem with iSCSI as i understand, is that i cant make an iSCSI LUN larger at an later time?

 

I just came to check on this use case as I am ready to buy a bunch of NVME storage that comes unraided. I'll need a soft raid.

Given the sad state of affairs (Vmware created) with ESX 7.0 drivers, I am going to have to do passthrough to a VM and serve it back to the cluster.

I was really looking forward to giving unraid a try but sounds like , at least the NFSV3 support is bad. I'm fine with iSCSI and have used that before (it's clunky but reliable). Why should I think that this will be more reliable than NFSV3 on unraid when NFSV3 according to others is completely stable on Synology. Sounds like an unraid problem.

 

Quote

Hi,

Am I the only one here wanting to use his storage server to be used with VMWare and configure Datastore ? As I can see, the only way to use UnRAID with VMWare is with NFS. And do not seems to be very stable as VMWare lost the disk often.

So is there any way to use (with stability and speed) UnRAID for VMWare Datastore ?

P.S.: I'm curently in the process of buying 10Gb NIC between UnRAID and my 2 ESXi

Well I see that I'm not alone on this, did you find a way ?

I am not interested in using the datastore for the VMS, but rather as a repository for Templates or isos.

If I try to connect Vsphere with unraid I get this message:

"Operation failed, diagnostics report: Mount failed: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.: The NFS server denied the mount request"

 

Thanks!

Edited October 17, 20232 yr by rojarrolla

Was anyone able to perform this?