Upgrade assistance please

[triafgg]

Hi, hope some one can help.

I wish to upgrade my UnRAID and just wanted someone to sanity check that I am doing it correctly. Currently have domains share with VMs on a small NVME drive as a pool device called cache_nvme. Share is set to prefer:cache_nvme. I want to upgrade CPU, MB and add a faster 1TB NVME drive for the domains. Is this the best order of operations.
Change domains share to cache No.
Run Mover to put share onto array
Shutdown array/PC
Add new hardware(CPU, MB & 1TB NVME)
Restart PC in GUI mode, check disk allocations
Add new 1TB NVME to pool devices as cache_nvme2
Start array
Change domains share to Prefer:cache_nvme2
Run mover to move domains to 1TB NVME(cache_nvme2).
VMs should now be running from 1TB NVME

 

Many thanks in advance

[JonathanM]

Turn on help on the share settings page. What you want is cache: yes

and you need to stop / disable the vm service before you run mover

There should not be a VM's tab in the GUI while you are doing this.

[triafgg]

Thanks for your reply.

So apart from using cache:yes at the beginning would you say that the rest of the procedure is OK? And also disabling the VM service.

I got to thinking though, would the domains share better off being cache:only as I want to keep everything on the NVME drives, rather than cache:prefer. I guess set to cache:prefer initially to move the data to cache and set to cache:only when mover complete, is that correct? At the moment all the VMs are on the NVME as it still has spare capacity. I have VM backup backing up the VMs.

Edited March 30, 2022 by triafgg

[JonathanM]

17 minutes ago, triafgg said:

would the domains share better off being cache:only as I want to keep everything on the NVME drives, rather than cache:prefer

Probably not a lot of difference for most people, as the only time there are new files created is when a new VM is defined.

 

Personally I use cache:only as follows. New VM's get set up on the pool, as I want them to be fast. I manually move less used VM's to one of the main array disks, but since I use the same folder structure, they all still appear under the domains share, and since the share is cache:only, mover doesn't try to put them back on the pool like it would if it were cache:prefer. The VM's never know the difference, they can run fine from either location.

 

If you wanted your newly created VM's to be on the array, then manually move them to the pool if you wanted more performance, then you would set domains to cache:no, and new VM's would be created on the array, and you could manually move the ones that need more speed to the pool.

 

If you want to move things manually, make sure you never mix /mnt/user paths with /mnt/diskX or /mnt/<poolname> paths. You can easily delete data doing things that look correct. As long as you only move between /mnt/diskX and /mnt/poolname paths you will be fine. Stay out of /mnt/user for manual file moves unless you educate yourself on exactly how the /mnt/user magic happens.

[triafgg]

Many thanks, got that now.