I haven't built an unRAID server yet...still trying to digest all of this.  I can see it's benefit of storing movies, music, photos, and all sorts of files that you want to keep safe.  I would use it for the same sort of thing, however I do a fair amount of development using ASP.NET, ColdFusion, SQL Server, MySQL, etc.  Currently I use VirtualBox on my personal computer with a copy of Windows 2008 Server and do all of my development that way.

 

I can continue to do that, however I wanted to know if it would be beneficial to setup VirtualBox on the unRAID server instead.  Any drawbacks?

 

If anyone else uses unRAID as a development server, please let me know your thoughts.

 

If it's something that would work better than my current setup, I would need to know what sort of CPU and memory would be required.

 

Thanks

There are a couple of drawbacks, but it's not a bad idea.

 

Firstly, if you store your VM on the array, it will be incredibly slow due to the limited write speeds. This would be made worse by SQL, and frequent small reads/writes. However, if you have it stored on a drive that isn't in the array, it might be a lot faster.

 

Also, you'll need to connect to the VM via RDP or VNC. The VM will run on most hardware, providing the motherboard supports virtualization. Build your unRAID to be as fast or as slow as you want.

 

I'm thinking of a similar setup, and might explore this sooner than later.

Thanks for the reply.

 

I wanted to know in advance as I would build the server to accommodate this from the start.  I didn't want to have to upgrade within months after when I decided to put a development via VirtualBox on the unRAID server.

 

I like the idea of only having to leave this machine on 24/7 serving both media and development needs.

 

Putting it on a non-array drive sounds like the best option, but I have no idea how that all will work since I haven't even tried unRAID outside of setting it up ON a VirtualBox.  Speaking of which....it's probably a stupid question, but could you test it out by using the VirtualBox unRAID version to setup VirtualBox on it? 

Otherwise, virtualize the other way around and install unraid on ESXi (discussed elsewhere in theese forums) then you can run your developer VMs etc. on the same host without the parity write penalty etc.

Speaking of which....it's probably a stupid question, but could you test it out by using the VirtualBox unRAID version to setup VirtualBox on it? 

 

...AFAIK nested virtualization is not supported by vbox....not in a way

that would allow you to install a Windoze system inside the top-level virtualizer.