Can any please assist in letting me know how anyone is expected to trial a rather expensive software when its so difficult to actually trial it by trying get it running in a virtual environment?
I'm currently debating between Unraid and Truenas for my new NAS upggrade, Truenas is free so its a hard sell, but there are some features of Unraid that i do like and would prefer to have.
However the lack of providing a bootable ISO to use. and the requirement to boot from a USB, which Virtual Box physically cant do means I cant test the software to see if i like it and it works how i want it to work before ever bringing it near Live hardware. Im not going to be willing to spend a penny on something i cant actually try out?
Is there any way, that isnt a pain to do that i can actually get Unraid running within Virtual box so i can actually see if its worth the money or not?
The fact its so hard to trial does not fill me with confidence.

The licence is tied to the usb guid, this is also enforced for the trial, hence no bootable ISO.

During the trial it will also need internet access to validate the trial period.

Also note that virtualized Unraid is not officially supported, but this forum is here for those that choose to do it anyway.

 

Virtualbox can certainly support usb passthough, so there is no physical blockers to running a trial in Virtualbox, as long as you have a physical usb key with unraid installed.