Unraid for Business Use?


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I really like the concept of an OS running fully from RAM in a business situation (like what Unraid does) because that keeps the configuration settings very well defined and easy to troubleshoot and revert if/when issues arise. Also generally the OS is kept very minimal and simple (to minimize RAM usage) minimizing the exposure to possible issues or mistakes as compared to a regular full OS installed onto a hard drive. Unfortunately, I'm only aware of three such OS solutions in the storage space, Unraid, XigmaNAS, and sort of Vmware ESXI. ESXI has very limited hardware support and even though we will be using business level hardware along with enterprise level drives it doesn't seem to have all the needed drivers for our setup (and developing new drivers seems to be next to impossible since it's a custom kernel with no public information available). XigmaNAS is also fairly limited with drivers since it runs on FreeBSD. That leaves Unraid which has good driver availability since it's based on Linux. However, I'm wondering if Unraid can be considered a business quality solution. It feels like we're mixing business hardware, enterprise drives, with a home use OS. However, maybe that's just a misconception. Is anyone using Unraid in a business situation? How stable has it been?

 

Edit: a few more details. This would be for a small business. Lack of vendor support is not considered a problem cause it's usually either too slow or too expensive in my experience for a small business. I think the main concern is stability. Having the server crash and corrupt data in the process would be the biggest thing we need to avoid.

 

Thanks,

Harry

Edited by HarryMuscle
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I'm running four production servers and two labs. Ramping up to six production within the next two weeks.

Data loss has never occurred - I had a lot of "bad luck" with BTRFS, but I moved away to XFS and am fine now.

unraid is VERY stable, however some "rogue" VM's and docker were able to cause some issues (by flooding the log, etc) - but that would also kill any other OS/distro with a lv1 hypervisor.

 

Two things are missing from my point of view:

1.  some kind of reliable notifications - this is especially annoying if you fail over on WAN and don't receive notifications.

2. VM snapshots (there are some solutions, but those ain't great).

 

Again, that stuff does not come out of the box on other OS either.

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13 hours ago, HarryMuscle said:

Edit: a few more details. This would be for a small business. Lack of vendor support is not considered a problem cause it's usually either too slow or too expensive in my experience for a small business.

This addresses my only concern when I see someone asking about Unraid in a business setting.

 

My normal answer is, Unraid is great for a business ONLY IF THE PERSON SETTING UP AND MANAGING THE SERVER IS AN OWNER OR SIMILAR PRINCIPAL IN THE BUSINESS.

 

If you are an employee in a business that could conceivably move on in the future and the business would continue, don't try to sell the owner on Unraid. Either you will get stuck supporting the server after you leave, or the server will get neglected and lose data. Either way, it's not a good look for Unraid.

 

If you are an IT company selling AND FULLY SUPPORTING Unraid for your customers, then great, just be sure to let the business principals know what is needed to maintain Unraid if your company is no longer capable or decides to move on.

 

Unraid is great, and really not a problem to maintain if you have the skillset, but calling geeksquad (or insert your local generic windows pc shop) isn't going to work. Somebody familiar with Unraid must be involved in the ongoing care and feeding of the server, or it will become a liability.

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