Help and Advice please...

[Hoe]

Hey all,

 

I am looking for some advise as I am trying to do something a little out of the ordinary and I don't know if it's even possible, there is 2 problems I am trying overcome at this stage...

 

1. Installing Unraid in a Hyper-V VM, can't seem to find an ISO anywhere, none of my USB's works as Pass-Through disks so I can't even get the OS installed at this stage, I am hoping either there is some ISO's available or someone can point me to creating one (I tried with ImgBurn but no luck), that was using a bootable USB as the source.

 

*I know many of you are probably going to tell me this is a bad idea and it should go the other way around with Unraid as the host OS and truth be told long term it almost certainly will, but right now I need to test the concept and get past other hurdles before I destroy that host OS as it's running VM's for both my Office stuff and for OPNSense which has it's own dedicated NIC's so it's not going to be straight forward and well one thing at a time!

 

 

2. I have a Synology DS918+ Paper Weight unfortunately, I have 4x 12tb Seagate Ironwolf Drives in it but it won't boot, long story but Synology basically told me to buy a new one, I am not impressed and will not give them a penny more, especially as the issue first surfaced in warranty but finally went critical just outside of warranty and they are refusing to accept responsibility!!!

 

Anyway I had or more to the point hopefully still have 24Tb of usable data on that in a RAID 10, something I very much hope to recover, there is instructions from Synology for recovering my data at least...

https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover_data_from_my_DiskStation_using_a_PC

 

Now I cam put this in a VM and boot it up and copy the data out, if only I had 24Tb spare to copy it too (yay) or I and I don't know if this is possible but can I use that existing RAID in UnRAID? Given that the OS will be on a different drive anyway?

 

I know I can pass though the physical disks to the VM but I didn't know if I could avoid having to use Ubuntu to access the data to copy back into Unraid?!

 

If not I have to consider risking the raid by removing 2 disks and creating a new raid on unraid, copying the data, before finally adding the old drives to the new raid, that is what I hope to avoid?!

 

P..S. If anyone knows a UK\EU based Synology based repair place that might be helpful, either way though they've burnt me I need to switch!

 

Thanks 

 

[Squid]

1 minute ago, Hoe said:

can't seem to find an ISO anywhere

Because there are none to be found.  What people do in that circumstance (eg: ESXi) is use "plop" https://forums.unraid.net/topic/38999-compiled-info-unraid-as-guest-on-esxi/, but no clue if this is still valid or not.  And the first stumbling block would be that the OS requires a USB stick (even in trial mode)

 

 

 

[Hoe]

18 hours ago, Squid said:

Because there are none to be found.  What people do in that circumstance (eg: ESXi) is use "plop" https://forums.unraid.net/topic/38999-compiled-info-unraid-as-guest-on-esxi/, but no clue if this is still valid or not.  And the first stumbling block would be that the OS requires a USB stick (even in trial mode)

 

Hmm that couold be a problem, I can try another hyper-visor or get a more suitable disk if need be, can you tel me what it uses it for othar than the install is it used as like a license key or something?

[itimpi]

3 minutes ago, Hoe said:

 

Hmm that couold be a problem, I can try another hyper-visor or get a more suitable disk if need be, can you tel me what it uses it for othar than the install is it used as like a license key or something?

As well as containing the files for booting Unraid, the USB is also part of the licensing mechanism, and it also store all configuration information for the customisations a user makes to their Unraid setup.

[Hoe]

Well that's a little annoying, especially as I managed to find a USB Drive I can take offline but I can't seem to make it bootable, the USB tool does not recognise it as it's not a flash drive and if I manually run make_bootable.bat it reports success but Hyper-V still won't boot from it for whatever reason(s).

 

Shame I can't get a Virtual Disk to work as one that would be ideal in this case.

 

I think I'll just have to bite the bullet put by VM Router back to Router mode install UnRAID on hardware then get my VM's back up in UnRAID so I can put my Router back to Modem mode and carry on, just hope the NIC Passthru works properly, this is going to be fun I can tell!

 

That still doesn't solve my second question about my previous RAID, can I use this in UnRAID to copy the data out or am I better off putting that in s VM in Ubuntu as the Synolgoy article advises, they seem to use "mdadm and lvm2"  IDK if that is the same and unraid and maybe the data is easily readable and I don't need a complete raid rebuilt etc?!

 

Thanks

[trurl]

Unraid must format any disk it uses in the array or pools. Best way to transfer RAID data to Unraid is over the network

[Hoe]

17 hours ago, trurl said:

Unraid must format any disk it uses in the array or pools. Best way to transfer RAID data to Unraid is over the network

Over the network to what though, I have 4x 12Tb Disks which were in RAID 10, so I could boot the RAID with 50% of the drives and use the other two as the destination though obviously that's risky but then I'll have to build a RAID on UnRAID with 2 disks and add two later which I think is possible in UnRAIDs world from what I have read but IDK if that limits the type of RAID I can build, I.E. Can I still do a RAID 10 starting with only 2 disks or is there a better way?!

 

The only other way I can think of would be to buy more disks something I am pretty keen to avoid right now!

 

Thanks

[trurl]

23 minutes ago, Hoe said:

RAID on UnRAID

Unraid IS NOT RAID, hence the name. In the parity array, Unraid uses its own method for parity which allows the data disks to remain independent (no striping) and so mixed sizes can be used. You can have btrfs raid modes in a pool separate from the parity array.

[Hoe]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Unraid IS NOT RAID, hence the name. In the parity array, Unraid uses its own method for parity which allows the data disks to remain independent (no striping) and so mixed sizes can be used. You can have btrfs raid modes in a pool separate from the parity array.

Thanks I kinda got that though haven't had a chance to read up just too much going on atm, but thought there would probably be options on how it was used and that I maybe able to work with previous setup anyway, thanks for confirming I can't at least.

 

When you say no striping does that mean in all UnRAIDs setup you are only ever getting single disk performnace or am I missing something in how it works?

 

Sorry I know this is probably all found in articles which I should and will probably have to read but this is still discovery stage and I just don't have the time atm to go through pages and pages to find it.

 

Thanks

[trurl]

25 minutes ago, Hoe said:

When you say no striping does that mean in all UnRAIDs setup you are only ever getting single disk performnace or am I missing something in how it works?

Data disks in the parity array are independent filesystems. Each file exists completely on a single disk. Read speed is at the speed of the single disk the file exists on. Write speed is somewhat slower than single disk speed since parity is updated realtime. Two different methods for parity update are available, one is faster but requires all disks to be read, the other only needs parity and the disk to be written so others can be spun down.

 

Folders can span disks (user shares).

 

Since these are independent disks, they don't have to be the same size. Parity is a completely separate disk. Two independent disks for dual parity with independent parity algorithms so they can give redundacy for two missing disks. Each parity disk must be at least as large as any single data disk.

 

33 minutes ago, Hoe said:

all found in articles

The documentation can be accessed from your Unraid webUI by clicking the "manual" link at lower right, or the Documentation links at top and bottom of the forum.

 

This overview is a good start:

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Overview

[trurl]

6 minutes ago, trurl said:

Data disks in the parity array are independent filesystems.

You can also have one or more pools separate from the parity array. These are often SSDs for fast storage. Multiple disks can be used in each pool if they are setup to use one of the btrfs raid modes.

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Storage_Management#Pool_Modes

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Storage_Management#Change_Pool_RAID_Levels