June 26, 201214 yr I am planning to build an UnRaid server on my current ESXi 5 Box and am wondering if I should use physical or virtual drives? Does anyone know of any pros and cons of each? I would think that using Virtual Drives would provide more flexibility.
June 26, 201214 yr without you giving us any information on how your virtual drives would be created or hosted. that question is impossible to answer. In general, while virtual might look more flexible.. physical would be much easier to manage. especially if you are using passthough on an entire controller. you would also run into a limit of 2TB for virtual disks. IF you had 3TB or 4TB drives, you would have to split the disk into 2 virtual disks. IF you did that and WHEN that drive fails, you would loose 2 virtual drives and you could NOT recover from that.
June 26, 201214 yr Author Well I currently have 4 X 1.5TB and 4 X 2TB Drives to work with. 1 drive would be dedicated to Virtual Machines (probably a 1.5) and then I would have room for 5 more Drives in the case. I would only ever have a single Vdisk on any one Physical Disk. Some advantages I could see to using vdisks is that I could have one physical drive act as both a data drive and a cache drive. Also if I every needed to change the drives it would be as easy as moving the vdisk from one physical drive to another. Another consideration I need to make is for Backups. To which I am considering creating 2 Unraids. The second being Physical Hardware and being used strictly for Backup.
June 26, 201214 yr Wouldn't you take a massive performance hit by using the same drive for two purposes? Also I think there would be a much higher chance of breaking the unraid. I passed through one of my SAS controllers directly to the Unraid install and it works great
June 26, 201214 yr I looked at doing this for my cache drive - unRaid could only see the virtual disk if it was an IDE disk (not the default scsi) and the performance was terrible. This was on a SSD. Also you lose all the great features like disk temp, spin down etc
June 26, 201214 yr I looked at doing this for my cache drive - unRaid could only see the virtual disk if it was an IDE disk (not the default scsi) and the performance was terrible. This was on a SSD. Also you lose all the great features like disk temp, spin down etc excellent points BQ..
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