Ease of migrating production server to ESXi?

[Swixxy]

Hello all, I just have a quick question in regards to moving my current production unraid server to be running off of an ESXi server.

 

My server is running perfectly fine at the moment, all set up and running flawlessly however i would like to be able to run a few VM's on the box that i can't run alongside unraid at present, such as a virtualised desktop so i can setup some thin clients around the house, rather than each family member requiring a high powered computer to run effectively.

 

However i only currently have the one unraid server, which has at present 6TB of media (Movies tv shows etc) as well as subsonic, sabnzbd, couchpotato, sickbeard, headphones and a minecraft server all set up and running perfectly fine.

 

I've been reading about how to get it working, however providing i disconnect the hard drives and so on, would it really be a case of just installing it and then plugging unraid back in? (More or less) without risk of unraid deciding the drives are incorrect? Or would there be a real risk of data loss.

 

While i see that ESXi is overkill for the use at the moment, something like VMware server seems to involve changing the unraid kernel and general tinkering that goes beyond the scope of looking up documentation online, something that i feel is beyond me.

 

Anybody had any experience doing this or something similar that they can share how well it went? (Or what to watch out for!)

[Johnm]

My server is running perfectly fine at the moment, all set up and running flawlessly

 

Err... if it aint broke. don't mess with it!

 

That said.. before you even think about it.

you need to make sure your hardware supports ESX, more important, that it supports VT-D so that you can pass-though your hardware to the Guest OS, unRAID in this case.

 

IF you are OK after that point. migrating would be fairly simple. fortunately for us, unRAID was designed to be hardware portable (easy to change the hardware and still work without data loss).

[prostuff1]

you need to make sure your hardware supports ESX, more important, that it supports VT-D so that you can pass-though your hardware to the Guest OS, unRAID in this case.

What he said above.  You need to make sure your board and CPU can do VT-d.  My ep43-ud3l does VT but NOT VT-d even though the chipset supports it.  Gigabyte failed to implement VT-d in the BIOS so I am out of luck.

 

The only way I can run unRAID is with RDMed drives into unRAID with ESXi supported hardware.