physical unraid server to VM question

[TechnSide2]

Hello fellow Unraider's ,

 

My old PC is a 2700K intel processor.  and does not support iommu grouping  / pci passthrough.    I have an old GTX 960 GPU  and would like to use this as my streaming PC b/c the GPU supports NVENC.  I explored the VM option in unraid but the performance was not great and the lack of PCI passthrough was a let down, not unraids fault,   just my old crappy hardware.    

 

So my thinking was let's switch,  the host OS is windows to allow full access to GPU.  Then run UNRAID in a VM.  

Well after  some googling and YT vid watching I was able to get it to boot on Virtualbox.   

 

I was passing through the Physical hard drives to the virtual machine but the problem is the drives now show up as VBOX_HARDDRIVE_######   hhd's instead of the original device ID / name.  so all my disks were missing and could not  start the array.  

 

My question is,  is there a way to setup a "new config" and not blow away any of the data I have stored on my 5 HDD's .. I don't have spare hdd's to copy the original data off b/c it's too large of an ammount.    Any help would be appreciated.  thanks !

 

 

 

 

Edited January 27, 2022 by TechnSide2

[TechnSide2]

Just an update on this.  I was successful in running my unraid in a VM.  I used virtualbox to passthrough the USB drive and also the bootable ISO from plopkexec.  Also I popped up a new UNRAID server in TRIAL mode.  I had enough spare drives laying around to get enough space to copy out what I had on my original UNRAID server just as a backup.  Either way I did a new configuration and assigned the larger parity drive and then my  data drives.  A parity sync happened and most if not all my data was there.  All I can say is I'm glad I copied out the data before I started as it saved me on a few critical dirs.   Either way I'm now successfully running my UNRAID server in virtualbox. 

 

Good luck unradiers !!