Platform jump validation

[anatoli]

Hi there,

 

been ruminating about moving from Proxmox to Unraid but can't figure out whether it's a good pick or not.

 

The current config of Proxmox is a 3-layered hierarchy I'd say, meaning that most of the data is stored on 2x RAID 10 Virtual Disks with 4x 8TB each and some VMs split between 2x SSD and 4x NVMe mdadm RAIDs, going from cold to fast then faster.

 

What's going on currently on it?

• NFS/SMB shares (just a couple, documents and backups mainly) exported by the host
• LAN routing, using an OPNsense guest VM
• Docker, multiple guest VMs having either Docker or Podman containers
• VPN and reverse-proxy through Pritunl & Pritunl Zero

The Unraid build would eventually consist of above drives:

• 8x 8TB HDD (array?)
• 4x 256GB NVMe (cache pool?)
• 2x 512GB SSD (array/cache pool?)

 

The main purpose of it would be storage, routing (OPNsense VM) and containerization which seems to be just about what Unraid does. Most of the workload could be extracted from the VMs as containers could all run on the host, while the router, VPN and reverse proxy would most likely stay as standalone VMs. Would also love to be able to safely have Time Machine backups working on my Mac, without NFS breaking it.

 

There's a lot of documentation to dive into to figure out how this could be applied in Unraid as the cache pools are the most interesting part of it all, but not gonna lie an insight from someone that's actually using it would be much appreciated.

 

Should I stick to my current Proxmox setup or is it worth the burden? What's the best approach to achieve this goal (documents, backups, VMs and containers) running on HDDs, and boosting speeds with SSDs and NVMes? How can I keep data safe and fast with drives listed above?

 

(throw in a factual response and an Unraid fanboy one, both would be much appreciated)