Unraid in a public cloud

[IcEDFiRE]

Hi,

I don't use UNRAID as a NAS (it started that way, but things changed), instead I continued using it for its easy-to-use, very detailed GUI, especially in terms of Containers, VMs and Community Apps (and of course the community behind it). The hardware UNRAID is running on is ageing and I was wondering if it's possible to shift my setup to a Cloud VM (Azure, AWS or Oracle). I don't have important or personal data on this system, so I'm not worried about that. Given that UNRAID uses a USB to boot, what are the options? I've seen some posts where some managed to run UNRAID in Hyper-V, so I would guess that if that VHD is uploaded to Azure, it should work too, right?

 

I'm only aware of one other OS that gives what UNRAID gives, and still, it's not as polished, so it would be great to have this option available and might be a new branch in the development of UNRAID.

 

Any help, pointers, or maybe alternatives are welcome. 

[JonathanM]

The USB isn't just the OS archive files and persistent configuration, it's also the license verification dongle.

 

Unless you can send your physical USB to the hosting center and get someone there to connect it to your specific host, it's not gonna work.

 

Unraid just isn't designed for that sort of deployment. It's only through community efforts that running it as a guest is even possible, there is no development time spent on anything but bare metal, and the developers are stretched thin enough as it is.

[ChatNoir]

I think that I read on the forum of people using Hetzner to host Unraid instances. Not 100% sure though.

[IcEDFiRE]

9 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

I think that I read on the forum of people using Hetzner to host Unraid instances. Not 100% sure though.

Thanks, will look into it

[IcEDFiRE]

15 hours ago, JonathanM said:

The USB isn't just the OS archive files and persistent configuration, it's also the license verification dongle.

 

Unless you can send your physical USB to the hosting center and get someone there to connect it to your specific host, it's not gonna work.

 

Unraid just isn't designed for that sort of deployment. It's only through community efforts that running it as a guest is even possible, there is no development time spent on anything but bare metal, and the developers are stretched thin enough as it is.

Yes, I know the dongle acts as the license verification. However, that can change (especially since we're using UNRAID Connect now), similar to what other software vendors (when they used sentinel dongles for licensing) had to do when VDIs became more popular.

 

No hyperscaler would agree to attach a 3rd party USB dongle to their servers, so not really an option is it?  

 

I understand that it isn't designed for that, that's why I said it might be a branch they might be willing to explore (in the future). Most of the code base is already there, and most probably the only thing stopping it from being deployable in a public cloud at the moment is the USB dongle.