Windows 2008 server and unraid?

[jakev]

I have been looking over win2k8 server and noticed that by default it can run Sever Virtualization (virtual machines/servers).

 

Is there any reason to think it would (or wouldn't) be possible to have unraid running as a virtual server on 2k8?

 

More info here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/test-drives.aspx

[NLS]

Virtualization is not a function new to 2k8, it has just been improved.

 

You can download and run VirtualPC or Virtual Server with XP or 2k3.

 

Your problem is how many controllers and disks will "Virtual unRAID" see.

Also your NIC. Will you dedicate one? Or share?

 

And after all it is what you need.

 

If it just for archives, why not.

If it is an on-line storage server that will have constant, multiple I/O, I would prefer not.

 

 

[jakev]

Ideally I'd use one of our builtin NIC's solely for unraid... but what I was hoping for was the ability to bypass the network transferring to/from the server to unraid (since they're both in the same machine). But I'm not sure that is possible.

 

Also, the biggest issue I see is something you bring up... can unraid see all the drives (and have access to them) as a virtual server or not?

 

But if this would work... I sure do have a lot of fun ideas to try!

 

I would LOVE to not bottleneck things with gigabit network connection (the main thing unraid used for is backup of data).

 

It would also be nice to bundle everything away in one box, rather than two (or more).

 

Also, I would consider this as an option for a streaming media server for our website (unraid within 2k8).

[NLS]

Ah so you talk about using the "internal" connection between the virtual machine and the host.

Yes this would work and probably "nicely enough".

 

With the recognized drives you probably WILL have problems though, as AFAIK there is a rather low limit of the number Virtual Server emulates.

 

Probably this is not the right place to ask. This is unrelated to unRAID (or whatever you plan to virtualize) and is probably a Microsoft question.

 

Also look at VMWare.

 

 

[josetann]

 

Also look at VMWare.

 

 

 

VMware only works with four virtual IDE disks (whether they're disk files, or raw disks, you're limited to four).  unRAID doesn't seem to like VMware SCSI disks, if someone can tell me what needs to be compiled in for that to work, I'll gladly make a custom kernel for that.

 

I do not know how unRAID will work with Microsoft's Virtualization products, not sure anyone's tried it before.  Quick tip, see if it can boot directly from a USB device.  If not then you have a little more work but unRAID can boot off of a regular drive (you still need the usb key though if you have a paid version of unRAID).  If you try this please report back if you had success or not, others here have expressed interest in getting multiple OS's to run on the same machine, with one being unRAID (whether guest or host).

[WeeboTech]

vmware uses either a buslogic or lsi scsi controller.

The only caveat is the drives will not spin down automatically.

You cannot spin SCSI drives down.

[jimwhite]

You cannot spin SCSI drives down.

I don't believe that's true  .... it may be true about the linux drivers, but they CAN be spundown under Windows... 

[WeeboTech]

Let me correct it...

 

You currently cannot spin SCSI drives down with hdparm in linux.

(it has not worked on any of the SCSI drives or controllers I've ever had).

This ranged from an assortment of Adaptec and Buslogic controllers.

 

When you issue the hdparm command to spin the drive down you get an error.

 

[root@hercules ~]# smartctl -a /dev/sdb | head

smartctl version 5.36 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright © 2002-6 Bruce Allen

Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

 

Device: MAXTOR  ATLAS10K5_300SAS Version: BK00

Serial number: J80CZE4K

Device type: disk

Transport protocol: SAS

Local Time is: Thu Apr 17 15:29:27 2008 EDT

Device supports SMART and is Enabled

Temperature Warning Enabled

 

 

[root@hercules ~]# hdparm -y /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

issuing standby command

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(standby) failed: Invalid argument

 

Nor can you do this with USB drives at the current time. (at least I have not been able to with 7 different enclosures).

 

 

 

Although I found some interesting things about SCSI mid-layer suspend/resume.

So.. this has given me some food for thought.

 

Thanks! 

 

 

[musicmann]

Quick tip, see if it can boot directly from a USB device.  If not then you have a little more work but unRAID can boot off of a regular drive (you still need the usb key though if you have a paid version of unRAID). 

 

This could be a big issue in getting this to work.  I'm thinking that Virtual Server 2005 and Virtual PC 2007 don't have USB support.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember for sure.  I also don't know what virtualization enhancements have been made in Server 2008, or if USB support is now available.

[jakev]

I am going to give this a shot soon... I have two locations that have both win2k3 and unraid, so it is a worthwhile investment of time to setup a test server to see if this can be accomplished. One location is already in the process of upgrading to 2k8, and I'm considering it for the other (my personal home business).

 

MS is generous enough to allow a long testing period without buying a license for 2k8, so I'm downloading the ISO and going to test it out soon.

 

If anyone has any experience and wants to give me any suggestions... I'm all ears! I have never used any form of virtual machine/server previously, so this will be a fun experiment.

 

Thanks,

-Jake

[X4n]

it seams that hyper-v doesnt support usb, so you cannot mount your unraid flash to a vm

this means that unraid will never find your license, so your stuck with 4 drives max

i have no idea how the circumvent this problem

 

i'm currently looking into xen opensource with its pciback capability, but im having trouble installing it

[musicmann]

VMware Server supports USB pass-through, but I think someone said it is limited to 4 drives.  I've never tried running unRAID on it (other than to see if I could compile custom kernels), so I don't know if there is a way around it.  It's free, so it might be worth a look.  Jakev, I haven't read the EULA for it, so I don't know if it's legit to use it in a commercial setting.

 

X4n, I'd love to know how Xen goes for you.  Getting it working could give us another Linux-friendly VM platform.  What platform are you trying to install it on?  I just took a quick look at the README for 3.2 source and it references a 2.6.18 kernel.  Could your installation problems be due to a kernel mismatch?

 

 

 

 

[jakev]

Well... my plans are at least on hold for now.

 

I guess you have to have 2k8 server (64 bit) AND have specific hardware that supports this (from what I gather, all Xeon processors work).

 

While I do have two servers with the proper hardware (and one already running 64 bit 2k3), I don't want to experiment with this in a live environment.

 

So, until I have something a little nicer to experiment on... I'm sittin this one out for now. 

 

::edit::

 

Looking into the VMware option now... although with 4 drives I don't think it will be all that useful.

[X4n]

here is a little sumup of the stuff that i tested and found out.

 

ws2k8: no usb support, so its impossible to load your unraid configfile ea no pro license -> stuck at 3 drives max

microsoft was forced to remove some features from ws2k8 to make the releasedate, so i have no doubt that this will be incorperated some day 

for now ist a "no go"

 

vmware workstation: i am able to get it running, with pro license

i mounted 4 physical ide drives, but im unable to spindown the drives

the drives showup as VMWAREvirt00000, not as drive serial, so there is some virtualising going on

i guess this also prohibbits me from spinning down the drives

in the end not really an option since only 4 drives will be supported and they cant be spundown

 

vmware server: prolly the same limitations as above, but this version cant even mount physical drives

 

xen: this is a real b*tch to setup  this is prolly because im not that familiar with linux

you need to recompile the kernel with xen and make sure it has intel VT-d support (or the AMD version) and pciback

since this isnt 100% stable it will give some compile errors (at least it did with me)

 

in the end i gave up and just installed ubuntu and installed xen from its repository

this setup has intel VT-d, but im unsure if it has pciback setup the right way

i created some virtual machines, which worked quite well (same as vmware)

got unraid to boot, but just as ws2k8, im unable to mount the usb properly, so no license -> 3 drives max

it boots directly from the usb, but is virtualised some way, so the UUID is -2

 

next up was pciback, this is a feature that allows to domU (virtual machine) direct acces to physical hardware

so why not give unraid control over a usb port and my sata controller

so i tried to pciback  an usb controllers

this is were it all ended, i couldnt get pciback to work at all

i think this is because in my setup it isnt properly installed, so the only way is to compile the correct kernel

 

unraid with virtualisation installed: vmware server or xen, it wouldnt really matter

the only true missing peace for this to work is multicore support in unraid

you would need to setup a swapdisk, and a place to store your vm setting/disks

vmware server2 would truely be nice, since it as a nice http interface to setup vm's

so no telnet of vnc would be required, just a browser and your password 

 

this are the options i explored, and i found out that they all have problems

some make it impossible to run unraid on them, others we can work with

 

please forgive my language, im not native english

 

Xan

 

 

 

 

[Joe L.]

Have you tried VirtualBox yet?  It is another possibility and it seems easy to configure virtual drives.  I do not not its limitations, but it is worth a try

 

See here:

 

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/29/running-linux-from-within-windows-virtually/

 

Joe L.

[WeeboTech]

Nice summary X4n.

 

vmware workstation: i am able to get it running, with pro license

i mounted 4 physical ide drives, but im unable to spindown the drives

 

I was afraid this was going to be an issue. How did you configure the drive in vmware?

[WeeboTech]

on my slackware dev/vmware system, I just tried using a "physical disk", it creates it as a virtual SCSI disk

Because it is a SCSI disk to the virtual os, the hdparm will not put the drive into standby.

If it's an IDE/SATA drive, it could possibly be put into standby external from the vmware environment by using hdparm and setting the auto sleep value.

 

http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/

 

snippet from the man page

-S
    Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 second. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

[X4n]

Nice summary X4n.

 

vmware workstation: i am able to get it running, with pro license

i mounted 4 physical ide drives, but im unable to spindown the drives

 

I was afraid this was going to be an issue. How did you configure the drive in vmware?

 

in vmware the only way you can mount physical drive directly is true its ide

but the drives still show up as ide0:1-VMware0000blabla, so its not truely physical

 

scsi drive will not work, because unraid doesnt see them

i remember someone on the forum tried to compile the scsi driver into unraid but didnt have that much success

[ilkhan4]

Well, I got Unraid working using VirtualBox 1.6 on a Windows XP host. I can write up a more detailed version if anyone is interested, but here's the gist of it:

 

1. Create a new virtual machine in VB; create a new virtual disk in the wizard (1 GB or so); I set the memory to 512 MB; I set the network in mine to Host Interface and created a new virtual adapter, then I bridged the virtual adapter to my PC's network card

2. Download the Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD ISO and mount that to your new virtual machine

3. Boot the VM into Ubuntu (don't install, just use the LiveCD mode)

4. Start Settings -> Administration -> Partition Manager

5. Format the 1 GB virtual disk you've created as FAT32; don't know if it matters, but I also set the flags on the partition to "boot" and "system"

6. Start up a command line, apt-get mtools and rename the volume to "unraid" (more details on mtools here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive)

7. Reboot the VM so Ubuntu can see the volume

8. Download the Unraid zip and apt-get syslinux

9. Once it's installed, run "sudo syslinux /dev/sda1" (this should be what your 1 GB virtual disk partition is set to)

10. Extract the Unraid zip to the virtual disk

11. Reboot the VM and you should get the prompt for Unraid

12. Shut down the VM and go to the disk manager in VB; you'll need to set up the disks you want the VM to have direct access to (see page 121 of the VB user guide: http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.6.0/UserManual.pdf)

13. Once the disks are all set up, you should be able to start Unraid and set everything up from the web interface

 

(I realize there's lots of stuff I'm probably leaving out, so I'll try to come up with some more detailed steps later)

 

The downside, of course, is that since you're booting from a virtual disk and not USB, there's no serial number and so you're stuck with the free version. Still, that's enough for me so it works for now. It's nice not having to have 2 machines set up now since I use Unraid for near-line backups only.

[WeeboTech]

Do the drives actually spin down? I think this was an issue with vmware. i.e. the drives did not actually spin down.

[jakev]

Well, I've managed to temporarily get my hands on a 2k8 trial on a machine that supports hyper-v.

 

So far, I've not managed to have much success with any of the linux OSes I've tried... haven't even tried unraid since it appears we'd be limited to the trial/demo version (since no USB drive access).

 

I've tried to create a CentOS/cpanel/WHM setup to no avai (can install the OS, can't get Cpanel/WHM to install/udate)l... I've tried to get FreeBSD up and running without any success(can't install properly)... I have managed to get SOME version of linux runing (don't recall which one) as a desktop machine, but I think my lack of linux experience is really holding me back.

 

So I think I'm going to abandon this idea... man, I had my hopes up!

 

Thanks for all the input, everyone!