How to keep Containers and VMs on SSD pool?

[Passatiji]

Hello everyone.
I am planning to migrate to Unraid and activated trial to taste the system, it's my first day, some guidenace will be needed

There are two 4TB spinning HDDs assigned to an array (I am not sure in what RAID configuration they are but it's not the point right now).

There are four 1TB SSD drives in additional pool that system named cache by default and I selected zfs - raidz (this part is clear to me).

There will be additionally six 6TB spinners added in another raidz2 pool "storage" when I am comfortable to remove them from Truenas.

 

Features I would like to test are VMs and Containers but since Unraid concept is totally new to me I am not sure what are all those settings with primary / secondary location and mover. I want VM's and containers to run on SSD pool and not disturb spinning drives if I don't have to so in the future I could spin down main storage.

 

My logic is telling me that I should change these paths and point to "cache" pool. Is it possible? Any red flags in doint that?

 

 

Then what are all these options? Should I just disable them?

Thank you.

[Passatiji]

unraid-diagnostics-20240115-1150.zip

[JorgeB]

You can change to /mnt/pool_name but you can also configure the share to get the same behavior, set primary storage=pool and secondary storage=none.

 

Also a good idea to enable exclusive shares for better performance while using /mnt/user for shares that only use a pool ( Settings - Global Share settings)

[itimpi]

The default settings will achieve what you say you want.

 

You might want to read the section on User Shares in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page to get a better understanding of how the settings work.

[Passatiji]

Thank you guys for your help. I will read more in the manual, it's a lot of reading and experiemnting for relatively short 30 day trial.

 

I was surprised to see "/mnt/user" where you'd expect system level operations and I think that it's related to what Jorge is referring to. Can you please elaborate on this:

50 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

enable exclusive shares for better performance while using /mnt/user for shares that only use a pool

[itimpi]

All User Shares appear at the Linux level under /mnt/user.    If all files for the share are on a pool then you can dispense with the secondary storage option and the share can then be an Exclusive share which gets the same performance as going directly using disk shares.

[Passatiji]

I think that I am mixing terminology, a "Share" doesn't necessary mean a network share. Is it something like a "Dataset" in Truenas? If so...

It can be set so that it won't be a symlink but directly pointing to the cache pool. I think that I managed to do that.

 

 

 

Now... would the system move existing docker data if I point the docker to a new share here? I don't see "MOVE" to the new location button. Does it requires manual intervention?

 

[Passatiji]

I stopped Docker, moved files manually, changed paths, enabled docker. Looks like it works.