And unfortunately the lab VM side of this use case is being badly let down by Unraid's VM system.

 

Specifically, the lack of control over virtual networks is a deal breaker. Yes, I know I could make those networks through the terminal (and I have for my testing), but if I was going to do all of this through the command line, I'd roll my own custom Debian installation for free. I'm at the point where the amount of work that will be needed to get Unraid to do this is essentially the same.

 

This is before I get in to other issues like how altering VM settings often requires trimming XML manually (it complains about incompatible statements instead of just removing/changing them, it seems). Nested virtualization seems to be missing despite it allegedly being added back at the end of 2019 (running ESXi as a VM would solve a lot of my problems). The built-in private network 'virbr0' is broken (the bridge doesn't exist according to 'ip links'). There's also a number of issues with things like not being able to pick alternate network drivers (not everything supports virtio).

 

The actual Unraid parity system is very cool, and I love the flexibility it provides. Ultimately, though, it's not enough to overcome the major limitations of the VM system, and I'm likely going to be looking at other solutions. Maybe I just had the wrong expectations and this isn't what Unraid was meant for, but it still seems like it could be a good fit with a few relatively small fixes/changes.

 

If there's deeper knowledge I'm missing, any tips/advice would be appreciated. As I said, I do genuinely like the NAS side of Unraid, and I would gladly keep it around if the VM side worked better for my uses.

Before you throw the baby out with the bath, maybe try using virt-manager?

 

I have, but that gets back to my whole thing of "I could do this on Debian". To me the attraction of a paid distro like Unraid is the all-in-one web interface that allows me to manage all of its official features. Breaking my workflow out in to multiple tools to manage one system is where I was before with various custom Debian installations. If that's what I'm going to do, then I'd rather build my own so I don't have to work within the eccentricities of Unraid's KVM implementation.

Seems I'm not entirely giving up on Unraid, but I've come back at it with revised expectations. What Unraid turns out to be quite good at, is replacing QTS on my QNAP TS-451+.

 

I admit I hadn't looked at how trivially easy it is to replace QTS on QNAP's x86 NAS products. Unraid is far, far less bloated than QTS, and while the Docker implementation isn't perfect, it's not the mess that is QNAP's Docker system. I won't be bothering with VMs on this setup, as I'll be reverting the Dell server I had been testing it on to a more full-featured system (ESXi or maybe Debian with Docker + Virtualbox). Plus the added flexibility of Unraid's storage system, and I think this will be an ideal use case scenario for Unraid.