Feedback on Unraid and a few question on future ZFS support.


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Greetings everyone thank you for creating a nice community around Unraid. I have evaluated 4 other platforms commercial and open source before coming to Unraid. Overall I wanted to leave some feedback on the unraid platform and ask some clarifying questions on upcoming features. Regarding feedback there are two major key factors maturity of nas functionality and how integrated the community app ecosystem. Let me take a moment to explain. 

 

Nas Functionality: While there are a number of paper cut issues I won't go into unless asked there was one glaring issue that needs to be addressed by Unraid developers. Backups! A nas should be properly backed up locally and in the cloud or off site location alternative. This feature should be a core part of Unraid providing backup/replication. Right now this is a community led feature but it should be a deeply integrated part of Unraid. I'm not saying community can't provide alternatives but this should not be a community only feature. Other Platforms make it simple and lowers the bar by providing best practice for data management.

 

App Ecosystem: Consider the pathways involved with hosting services internally (LAN) or externally (WAN) for set up by the end user E.G. DNS records, reverse proxy, docker app data management and so on. Again there is community apps for these but no attempt to provide a unified built in to further support unraid's community docker platform. The user should be able to provide a domain/sub domains define if it's to be exposed if the service internally or externally, through a ports, VPN, cloudflare argo. Outside of a few details of Port forwarding and possibly DNS records this really could be automated for the user. Managing Docker App Data is very important as services corrupt their data or something else can go wrong. Going back to the backup issue App Data need to be easy to backup snapshot per service instead of the entire App Data. The above functionality would serve the majority of use cases.

 

At a high level there's a lot of advantages to having a community driven product but it does have some drawbacks. Fragmentation of user experience and therefore core product features. It doesn't have to be this way and that's by providing comprehensive features by default with Unraid.  Those defaults could be switched out for community alternatives. This allows the community to experiment and develop alternative approaches answering the community's needs which creates a feedback loop to inform the core Unraid platform.

 

Questions before purchase: On the horizon is Official ZFS support. Yes I know there's a community plug in for ZFS and I've used it. I look forward to this not only for the performance reasons but at the file system level it supports snapshots/replication. Will these features be integrated and exposed in the unraid GUI as a core feature? If I invest setting up now in unraid will there be a migration pathway to ZFS from existing unraid array?

 

Ultimately my question do the developers want to develop a full featured nas backup solution and a streamlined pathway for self hosting? These features could leverage existing open source projects. I wouldn't expect these features to be there in a year or even two years time. It takes time to roll these things out incrementally and then grow the maturity. Do you want to grow developing those features? I'm leery at this point Investing in the Unraid product that doesn't have a backup mechanism or the potential desire for the developers implement  backups as a core part of its feature set. Parity is not enough as a core feature. 

 

Overall I'm willing to invest in the platform if there's expression of interest from the developers to work on these issues as time allows.

Edited by BitForce
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Hi BitForce and thank you for all of this candid feedback!  We always appreciate the insights from our users.  Allow me to address some of what you wrote.

 

Backups

This is a really great suggestion and one we have definitely talked about a lot internally.  I can't comment much more than that right now, but know that in the meantime, there are a plethora of community-supported solutions for this.

 

App Ecosystem

Again, really great feedback and some of those things are already available in beta form (e.g. remote access).  I like a lot of the other ideas you have in there as well!!

 

Questions

Regarding ZFS support, yes, it is still on the horizon for future inclusion.  I can't speak to when each specific sub-feature of ZFS will be UI-controllable, and as far as migrating data is concerned, there will be no support for in-place filesystem conversions, so make sure you don't put the cart before the horse on this one.

 

As far as providing you insights on our vision for the future, all I can say is that we are committed to growing this community substantially.  Other than that, I cannot provide comments on specific features or speak to a 3-5 year roadmap.

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