The safest approach for migrating Unraid setup from one box to another

[shshekhar]

Hi Everyone,

My Unraid setup is running on a puny J1800 board with two disks, one for data other parity.

 

I am going to setup a home lab with slightly more capable system (Ryzen 5600x + Radeon 6600xt) running Proxmox. To avoid wasting energy, I’d prefer to have only one always online server at home. The current plan is to deprecate the existing Unraid box and run Unraid in a VM on Proxmox.

 

Keeping the Proxmox related complexities out of this, I wanted to confirm the following:

1. What’s the safest way to move Unraid setup from one box to other with minimum risk of data loss?

- I am thinking of setting up the Unraid in VM first, yanking data drive from current box and attaching it to the VM. If there is no data loss, the parity drive gets moved as well. Otherwise if something goes wrong, I should be able to access all data in emulated mode from existing box.
 

Does this sound reasonable? I am guessing this approach would not allow me to just migrate the boot drive, so all configuration will need to be done from scratch. Is there any way around it? Would it be safe to (first backup and) move boot drive to VM as well and see if things work fine on VM with missing parity instead?

 

2. Your opinion on running Unraid in VM sharing the host compute resources with other VMs / containers.

- Is this approach in itself too risky? While it is a home lab server and will see some experimentation, I plan to limit the experiments to a single VM. The overall Proxmox setup should remain pretty stable (1x Unraid [always on] + 1x Linux [always on] for experiments + 1x Windows [on demand] for gaming + 1x Linux [on demand] for programming). The drives will exclusively be passed to Unraid VM.

I would love to hear opinion and experience of other folks that have run box to box Unraid migration including physical drives and/or have setup Unraid in VM.

Edited December 27, 2023 by shshekhar

[JC-303]

New unraid user here and i am considering something similar.  Sorry I don’t have more to contribute now but I wanted to reply and follow along. 
 

My use case is I am migrating a large storage pool off of VMware into a new unraid server , after which I’m trying to decide if I fully dump VMware and move all VMs to unraid or if I spin up Proxmox on the original server once all data and apps are moved and then virtualize unraid (I could also keep them both running separate on dedicated hardware but don’t think I need that much horsepower/ electrical usage).  
 

looking forward to input from others. 

[ehnde]

Unraid is installed on a usb drive. Simply create a VM in proxmox passing through all of your array disks and cache disks that you had attached in unraid as well as the unraid boot USB. Make sure the new vm is set to boot from the USB drive. Now boot up your VM and see how it goes. 

 

The nice part is you can back out of this by plugging the USB drive and all of your disks back into your old hardware. Risk is minimal. I think the unraid license key is attached to the uuid of the usb drive, not your computer, so this really shouldn't be too bad. If you're using a SAS controller for your disks, make sure you pass that through to the VM. Better performance than passing through the disks. 
 

 

Edited April 10 by ehnde

[JonathanM]

13 hours ago, ehnde said:

Simply create a VM in proxmox

Keep in mind that running Unraid as a VM is not supported, if you have issues it's on you to solve them. It's not forbidden, plenty of people do it, but if you have a problem you will be asked to recreate the problem running Unraid bare metal before it will be considered an actual issue that the developers need to look at.

 

There is a section of this forum dedicated to users helping each other with virtualizing Unraid.