Noobie Questions

[mrmint]

Hello, 

 

I am in the process of setting up my first unraid server for my dad. I have went with a basic licenses and am wondering how best to set up the 6 disk for my dads basic requirements. Ideally, I would like to run one Windows VM as bare metal for use as his daily driver and perhaps PLEX and the some ARR dockers.

 

My thinking for his set up is:

 

Array  - 4 x 4tb HDD

Parity - 1 x 4tb HDD

Cache - 1 X 1TB NVME

 

My plan was at the moment is to run the a windows vm, dockers and a download cache all from the the 1TB NVME but I am wondering if there are any problems with this set up. Would I be better swapping one the the array drives to a SDD ( 500GB ) and setting up another cache for the downloads? I would prefer the space of the 4tb but was reading that multiple caches.

 

Last if I can run the Windows VM, dockers and download cache all from the same drive what would be the best way to set this up? Is there any guides you would recommend? I have be reading that you can run into issues with Window VMs increasing in size depending on how they are set up.

Sorry if I don't sound like I know what I am talking about. Unraid is very new to me so I still feel little unsure of things so any help or advice would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

 

 

[itimpi]

1 hour ago, mrmint said:

I have be reading that you can run into issues with Window VMs increasing in size depending on how they are set up.

This applies to the fact that when you set up a virtual disk (vdisk) file for a VM it is by default set up as a Linux ‘sparse’ file.   This means that the space is not actually used until the VM writes to it, but over time as the VM runs and writes to different parts of the vdisk file it can grow to be the full size you specified when setting up the VM.   As long as you allow for this you are fine.