noob trying to understand why to virtualize unraid

[hostingpro]

is this a matter of convenience? so i just bought my activation key and havent done anything with unraid yet... but i was under the impression that unraid is meant as an alternative to proxmox or esxi but here i see people using proxmox and esxi to spin up unraid... im confused. so are people just installing on proxmox and esxi because thats what they already have loaded on their servers and they want to use features in unraid without loading a new os or replacing their existing os. or is there some other pupose im not seeing...

Edited March 11, 2023 by hostingpro
want to clarify what i meant when i said "for convenience"

[trurl]

Most don't install Unraid as a VM, and doing so is not officially supported. The purpose of this subforum is for those users virtualizing Unraid to help each other. I'll have to let them answer why they are doing this.

 

Unraid can host VMs and dockers, and I'm sure the vast majority of Unraid users don't virtualize Unraid.

[doron]

As mentioned above, running Unraid as a VM is not a common occurrence, and isn't even officially supported.

Some of us do it, though. Reasons vary. For me, it is the combination of a few reasons.

(a) ESXi has been rock solid for me, for years now. It just works - and, in my scenario, it's always on, essentially feeling as part of the hardware. I've also not felt a need to update it (running an ancient 6.x version), so it's really always up - as long as the UPS can carry it. In contrast, I've been updating Unraid occasionally (that's a good thing!), taking it down from time to time for maintenance, and so forth. During those times, my other VMs were up and chewing. 

(b) Historically, for me, Unraid has mainly served as a (great) NAS, with its unique approach to building the storage array, protecting it etc. Its additional services (a few docker containers) have been an upside, running under Unraid as a convenience. Over the years Unraid as developed immensely and moved from being a storage solution into a one-stop-shop for your home server needs; I've not boarded that train - at least not completely. 

 

The shorter version is - I've started with VMWare as a hypervisor, it's been rock solid, my other VMs are not affected by Unraid's dynamic nature (updates etc.), never saw a good reason to flip that structure.

[duelistjp]

i've decided to put up with some inconveniences and not do it but have strongly considered virtualizing unraid in the past because vms and containers have to stop when the array is down but a good number of them i don't really need the full array. strongly considered virtualization to handle my main storage array i don't want to mess with zfs on but then have other things doing the vms and containers i don't need to have go down every time i need to restart the array

[ocyberbum]

1 hour ago, duelistjp said:

i've decided to put up with some inconveniences and not do it but have strongly considered virtualizing unraid in the past because vms and containers have to stop when the array is down but a good number of them i don't really need the full array. strongly considered virtualization to handle my main storage array i don't want to mess with zfs on but then have other things doing the vms and containers i don't need to have go down every time i need to restart the array

This is the same reason i had run unraid  with dockers in esxi7 and keep the VM's separate,  i am hoping to find away to run vmware workstation on unraid like i did on Ubuntu but until then i am working without ESXI to keep it simple for now and making sure i remember to shut down my Vm's 1st before taking the array offline!!