Blackhole 2.0 - 60TB v.Now with 100% more ESXi


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Well.. I do not have my esxi system up yet so I might be talking trash, but:

 

Why don't you set up a specific unraid (using only the free license) that you only use to preclear disks ?  That wat you can bring that VM up whenever you need to preclear (which is allmost never) and the rest of the time it will only use a little bit of diskspace...

 

I am planning on doing that.. Only thing I would need to do is switch the sata connector from mainboard to one of the expansion cards that are vt-d'd to the unraid VM ..

 

That way no chance of issues with the primary function of unraid..

 

Unfortunately this would not work for me as I would have to pass through a whole MV8 to the new VM. However I'm already using 18 slots already and logistically speaking this would be a pain of ass if I were to RDM the drives just for pre-clears and then connect them to the MV8.

Its my idea to run a VM specifically for unraid in its totally naked and bare form,  I would only run cache_dirs on it as I think that is as close as something can be to a core component.. No further plugins.

 

And then run another VM wherein I run Sickbeard, couchpotatoe, sabnzbd, transmission and airvideo.

 

The media stuff would need to "talk" to the unraid filesystem through a virtual network adaptor keeping all the traffic in the same physical box.

 

The unraid VM in that form would probalby be ok with 2 gigs.. The otherone can get 4 or 6 leaving me with enough to play around.

 

Basically I will be running with the same hardware, so no more costs,with the exception of the fact I needed to swap my cpu (but found a nice way to do that with little cost).

 

This is pretty much what I did. I have unraid VM on its own with just unmenu installed.

 

SAB/couchpotato/sickbeard etc etc on separate VM's with unraid drives mounted.

 

Make sure you use vmxnet3! 10GbE locally makes a huge difference!!

 

Just as an FYI.  The reason I chose 3GB for unRAID was that when I passed through more than that to a Windows 32 bit VM it could only see 3GB the rest was reserved address space.  On other PCs not virtualized I could get it to about 3.5GB recognized.  So I figured that anything OVER 3GB  in a unRAID VM will probably only be accessed with PAE memory swapping.  Also since I was virtualizing I put any plugins in a different VM.  I only installed things like unMenu, monthly parity check, drive overheat, etc... Basically if it wasn't designed to keep the unRAID server healthy I didn't install it in the unRAID VM.  Any other plugins I would install in another VM with a Windows OS or a full Linux OS and keep unRAID as more of an appliance.

 

I had a peculiar problem with my Unraid. I originally had 8GB before upgrading to EXSi. However when upgrading i moved all the plugins such as sickbeard/couchpotato/sab out to their own respective VM so i lowered the unraid VM RAM to 4GB. However I started noticing kernel panics whenever I did preclears. Since then changed it back to 8GB since i have room to spare at the moment. Anyways it kinda seems like a waste at 8GB since most of it is using as swap. Anyone else have this problem?

You aren't using a SAS expander by any chance are you?  The reason I ask is that I have problems preclearing drives on my VM's and someone else pointed out to me that I needed to upgrade the firmware on my SAS Expander (see my sig for model).  I haven't had a chance to update the firmware and test again.  I should also upgrade to a newer firmware on my M1015's since I'm still using P11. 

 

So you might try those options if they apply.  I don't remember getting any panic's but the preclear's were failing saying they could NOT preclear the drives and taking them to my preclear station that isn't on a SAS expander or virtualized would clear the drives just fine.

 

I'm not 100% sure it is a problem with preclears + RAM to be honest. However since booting the unraid VM with 8GB ram, i've successfully precleared 4 drives in the VM and server has been up for 2 weeks with no panics. Anwyays I'm not using any type of SAS expanders, just the MV8's.

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Yes I understood RDM would be a pain.

 

In my case however I will have my whole unraid array on two MV8 8-drive adaptors, that gives me 16 drives for unraid, only using 10 at the moment.

 

I also have 6 motherboard sata slots, 2 are specific SATA 600 slots. I am hoping I can vd those 2 sata-600 slots specifically and add them to the preclear VM.. That still leaves me with 4 SATA slots for other use then unraid....

 

Would a very cheap extra SATA expansion card (1 or 2 port) not solve your issue ?  assign that to the preclear vm ?

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I also have 6 motherboard sata slots, 2 are specific SATA 600 slots. I am hoping I can vd those 2 sata-600 slots specifically and add them to the preclear VM.. That still leaves me with 4 SATA slots for other use then unraid....
If you are talking X9SCM-F then no you won't be able to do that (assuming the "vd" was meaning you wanted to pass through the controller associated with those sata ports).  There is only one device listed for all 6 Sata ports.  So if you try to pass through any you will pass through ALL.  That is why people want 3 M1015s with it since they can only use the MB ports for datastores.  You could RDM the drives to a VM but then those drives will never spin down and you will not be able to get temperatures on those drives.
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Hi Kevin.

 

Two quick quesitons....

 

1.  I have a Sandy Bridge CPU (i3 2120...not the low power 2120t).  Do you know if this supports passthrough?

2.  What has been you impression with running unRAID in a VM...throughput wise?  Any noticeable lag compared to running natively?

 

Thanks,

 

John

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Nope, no vt-d:

 

http://ark.intel.com/m/nl/products/53426/Intel-Core-i3-2120-Processor-3M-Cache-3_30-GHz

 

See my sig for my setup. I am now running allmost conpletely stock unraid with sabnzb/couchpotato/sickbeard/spotweb/transmission in another vm. I can confirm that everything actually runs more "snappy". I am very happy with this setup and I would not have been able to do this without the atlas thread !

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Hi Kevin.

 

Two quick quesitons....

 

1.  I have a Sandy Bridge CPU (i3 2120...not the low power 2120t).  Do you know if this supports passthrough?

2.  What has been you impression with running unRAID in a VM...throughput wise?  Any noticeable lag compared to running natively?

 

Thanks,

 

John

 

As Helmonder pointed out, it does not support VT-D. I had to sell mine and buy the Xeon processor. Surprisingly the 2120 held its resale value pretty well. I bought it originally for $129 retail and sold it for $90.

 

Similar to Helmonder, I moved all my mods to a separate VM and unRAID runs noticeably faster/snappier.

 

Now the next milestone for me is to see how stable it runs long term. With my old setup, i had a problem at around 70-80 days uptime where I had to restart. So far looks so good.

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Running just regular instance of Ubuntu Server for the couchpotato/sab/sickbeard. In terms of settings, I think i have it set with 2GB ram and 1 core? I have the hard drives mounted and using vmxnet3 for both guest.

 

What problems are you having? is it with couchpotato setup or setting up esxi or a particular problem with couchpotato and esxi? Set up for me was pretty standard once ubuntu server guest was set up. Just install git, download it to ur /home directory or whatever you want to use and that's about it.

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