Planning on building general purpose server, is UnRaid the right OS for the job?

[MightyNutty]

Hello!

 

I am planning on building a new server for my workplace and wondering if UnRaid is the right tool to manage it.

It won't be super data heavy but the hardware I'm planning to build it with is a Threadripper 5975wx, 256GB of DDR4 3200 RAM and 2x 4TB WD Blue SSDs. Maybe a cache disk the be safe.

 

The purpose of this machine will be to host virtual machines and docker containers, all for internal use like development, bug testing and reproducing customer issues and hosting a vpn server. Besides the wireguard hosting it will have no outside access.

 

Now I personally have been using UnRAID for about a year and I really like the ease of configuration regarding just about everything! The WebUI is really great for that, but it might be the problem in my case.

What I need is a UI for managing users and rights management so each user can manage their own VMs and containers.

These users would also need their own UI to manage those things, console commands to manage it are sadly out with my userbase.

So my questions regarding all this are as follows:

I'm pretty sure "classic" user management is still not (if ever) possible in the UnRaid WebUI. Is there maybe a community application which does that? Or maybe a server/tool of some kind that can access and manage users and their vms and containers that I could host?

Or is UnRaid maybe just not the right tool for this job and I have to search for a different OS that can do all that I need for this project?

 

I hope you can help me with this. 😃

[SimonF]

Have a look at this not sure it will be simple to meet multi user. The is a open sec vdi solution I want to look at https://ravada.upc.edu/ but not had time

 

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/topic?url=https://forums.unraid.net/topic/135242-give-others-easy-access-to-your-vms-with-unraid-vm-cp/&share_tid=135242&share_fid=18593&share_type=t&link_source=app

[primeval_god]

25 minutes ago, MightyNutty said:

Or is UnRaid maybe just not the right tool for this job and I have to search for a different OS that can do all that I need for this project?

This. Multi-user management is simply not a feature of unRAID (either officially or through community plugins). Generally i try and dissuade people from considering unRAID for business purposes as its security, update cadence, support options, and overall design goals are focused on home use cases. More specifically for your case i would not be comfortable basing business infrastructure on some custom workaround for an unsupported feature (multi user). 

 

If the above doesnt convince you my suggestion would be not to run your multi-user VM/containers directly on unRAID. Nest them within a VM with an OS that provides the multiuser control you need.  

[JonathanM]

On 1/26/2024 at 9:43 AM, primeval_god said:

Generally i try and dissuade people from considering unRAID for business purposes

As a file server it can work out ok, as long as one of the principles of the company is the one actually doing the setup and maintenance.

 

If it's an enthusiastic employee pushing the concept, that won't end well, and it puts Unraid in a bad light when the employee moves or is moved on, and the server is left to rot.

 

I'm basically agreeing with you, but adding a conditional where Unraid can actually be successful in a business environment. I've implemented Unraid at the request of a small business owner before, and it worked fine. I explained that if he was ok with me being pretty much the only local IT that would touch it, I would set it up for him. It was a photography studio, and Unraid provided the storage for past projects after they were finalized on the local workstations. For the amount of storage, Unraid is cheaper than most other NAS solutions.