July 19, 201213 yr I currently have a Mac Pro (1,1) that I set up unRAID on using VirtualBox. However, I tried running preclear on this unRAID VM and the transfer speeds are abysmally slow, like 4 MB/sec. Am I doing something wrong in my setup? I see that some people are running unRAID as a VM, so I'd love to learn how you have configured your version to make it usable. I'd like to run unRAID on this box without needing a whole separate physical computer. I have a USB key with UNRAID on it (made the normal way) and created a VMDK file that maps to the flash drive, and this is able to boot into unRAID in a VirtualBox VM. I then added several VMDK files that each map to my empty SATA hard drives, configured my VM to use a virtual SATA controller, added these drives, and can see these devices inside Virtual Box as individual devices. Below are my VM Settings for Mac. VirtualBox Virtual Machine Settings Name: unRAID OS Type: Linux, Other Linux Base Memory: 2 GB Processors: 2 Boot Order: Hard Disk, Network (both checked); all others unchecked Acceleration: VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging, PAE/NX Video Memory: 12 MB (default) Remote Desktop Server: Disabled Audio: Disable Audio Network: Adapter 1: Intel PRO/1000 T Server (Bridged Adapter, en1: Ethernet 2) USB Port: Check both USB Controller and USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller No Shared Folders Hard Drive: SATA Controller; Flash.vmdk, Parity.vmdk, Data1.vmdk, Data2.vmdk Made vmdk files using the following command: VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename data#X.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk#Y ** All physical disks are unformatted Physical Machine Mac Pro 1,1 Quad-Core 2.66 GHz 13GB RAM 3 extra unformatted internal SATA hard drives (Bays 2-4)
July 19, 201213 yr Most people that I've seen are running ESXi in order to virtualize unRAID. ESXi as a host, uses far less resources than a user OS. Can you see what kind of transfer speeds you get by setting up another linux based host and copy files to and from the same set of drives?
July 19, 201213 yr Author A normal unRAID setup was seeing transfer rates between 80-120 MB/s, depending on the hard drive. This is just a setup where I would boot off the key. I'm not familiar with the ESXi platform. If this is a host virtualization OS, what advantages does it confer over just booting off the normal unRAID USB key? Can I run both Mac OS X and unRAID on the same box at the same time so I don't have to maintain a dedicated box? Also, what kind of speeds to people report on using unRAID on it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
July 19, 201213 yr ESXi is designed to be run on it's own box. The advantage of ESXi is that the underlying OS has a smaller footprint than a user OS (no GUI, etc). Because it's not a user OS, there is a much smaller chance of it crashing and taking all the VMs down with it. I get 105MB/s on my ESXi unRAID install at the start of parity checks, slowing down to ~65MB/s at the end (running green drives). My question regarding setting up a linux VM was that it should help indicate how fast the drives will run under virtual box.
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