August 29, 201114 yr It still sucks. I would love to be able to plug a USB HDD for backing up my WHS2011 using WHS's backup. It would also be nice for hosted storage inside a guest. USB to ethernet bridges work pretty well, especially if you are running a Windows guest OS.
August 30, 201114 yr we have a few of the Silex SX-3000's at work. i am not to impressed with them personally. that was the work around they were using to give some of the power uers usb ports at thier desks for ESX guests. I dont think we ever broke 10MB/s . perhaps it was that particular model. As far as the HDD boot. I did get around to rebooting my unRAID guest, it did keep the settings after reboot. I'll keep it like for a bit and see what happens.
August 30, 201114 yr Found a con. It will allow people with the click-happy disease (me) attach the vmdk as a disk in unRAID and then format it. If you suffer from this too, it might be wise to set the vmdk as independent/non-persistant...
November 10, 201510 yr A general tip for anyone running unRAID in ESXi (4.1 or 5.0) if you are looking for a very fast boot up. Make a .vmdk disk image of your thumb drive using WinImage. I used a spare (non-licensed) 2gb flash drive I had laying around and deleted the config directory and created the image from it (change the name after the make bootable part to something other then UNRAID). Upload it to your ESXi server and attach it to your unRAID VM. Still do the USB passthrough like you normally would. What happens is ESXi boots up from the vmdk image (very fast) and sometime during the boot unRAID mounts any flash drive with the name of "UNRAID" and reads the config/license data from it. Pro: 1. Boot up from the local HDD (less then 10 seconds on mine) 2. Config and license still stored on the thumb drive 3. Can do away with the plop boot manager/CD 4. Never have to remove the thumb drive and attach it to a Windows machine again. All "updating" is done on a spare thumb drive and the images created from it. 5. Can have a boot vmdk of every version sitting on your server. Booting a different version is as simple as attaching a different vmdk to the VM guest. Con: 1. Haven't found any yet. Hi Can i use this same method for unRAID 6?
November 10, 201510 yr A general tip for anyone running unRAID in ESXi (4.1 or 5.0) if you are looking for a very fast boot up. Make a .vmdk disk image of your thumb drive using WinImage. I used a spare (non-licensed) 2gb flash drive I had laying around and deleted the config directory and created the image from it (change the name after the make bootable part to something other then UNRAID). Upload it to your ESXi server and attach it to your unRAID VM. Still do the USB passthrough like you normally would. What happens is ESXi boots up from the vmdk image (very fast) and sometime during the boot unRAID mounts any flash drive with the name of "UNRAID" and reads the config/license data from it. Pro: 1. Boot up from the local HDD (less then 10 seconds on mine) 2. Config and license still stored on the thumb drive 3. Can do away with the plop boot manager/CD 4. Never have to remove the thumb drive and attach it to a Windows machine again. All "updating" is done on a spare thumb drive and the images created from it. 5. Can have a boot vmdk of every version sitting on your server. Booting a different version is as simple as attaching a different vmdk to the VM guest. Con: 1. Haven't found any yet. Hi Can i use this same method for unRAID 6? You will loose the ability to update the firmware from the webGui. It will update the flash, but then you will need to manually mount the .vmdk within unRAID and copy over the respective files.
November 10, 201510 yr A general tip for anyone running unRAID in ESXi (4.1 or 5.0) if you are looking for a very fast boot up. Make a .vmdk disk image of your thumb drive using WinImage. I used a spare (non-licensed) 2gb flash drive I had laying around and deleted the config directory and created the image from it (change the name after the make bootable part to something other then UNRAID). Upload it to your ESXi server and attach it to your unRAID VM. Still do the USB passthrough like you normally would. What happens is ESXi boots up from the vmdk image (very fast) and sometime during the boot unRAID mounts any flash drive with the name of "UNRAID" and reads the config/license data from it. Pro: 1. Boot up from the local HDD (less then 10 seconds on mine) 2. Config and license still stored on the thumb drive 3. Can do away with the plop boot manager/CD 4. Never have to remove the thumb drive and attach it to a Windows machine again. All "updating" is done on a spare thumb drive and the images created from it. 5. Can have a boot vmdk of every version sitting on your server. Booting a different version is as simple as attaching a different vmdk to the VM guest. Con: 1. Haven't found any yet. Hi Can i use this same method for unRAID 6? Check out the combined thread I made for ESXi stuff in my sig
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.