I've done a fair bit of Google-ing and searching on the forums. I've gotten (what I think is) a better grasp of how ESXi works than I had beforehand, but I still have a few questions.

 

What I want to do is have my server run unRaid and Ubuntu running as VM's. Ideally how this works in my head is that unRaid handles all the data storage with no add ons, but Ubuntu will be running on its own hard drive running, sabnzbd, sickbeard, couchpotato, torrents, dlna server, home minecraft server, etc... Pretty much Ubuntu runs whatever services I need it for.

 

From my understanding ESXi can be run from a flash drive. With that being said, an Ubuntu VM would be installed to one of the extra hard drives I have lying around. Then unRaid would "boot" in another VM from a flash drive like how it is supposed to sense it requires no hard drive?

 

Also, can unRaid and Ubuntu share the same NIC without an issue?

yes they can both share the same nic.

 

they will be using "virtual nics" connected to a single physical nic.

 

for the other question "VM from a flash drive like how it is supposed to sense it requires no hard drive"

 

Sorry dont understand the question!

 

 

 

Sorry, shortly after I made my post I edited the questions bit to try to make them more clear, but I guess it didn't really work. I was asking, that because unRaid is designed to be installed to, and ran from a flash drive, then I would not need anything else for it to run inside of a VM, correct?

VMs in ESXi will not boot from a USB flash drive (at least not with the standard bios I haven't tried the EFI bios yet).  You can setup a plop boot cd that in turn boots from the unRAID USB flash drive.  Or you can setup a virtual HDD and boot from that with the unRAID flash drive also connected - this is how I have my unRAID servers setup.  Doing it that way is faster than booting from a plop cd because the bzroot and bzimage files boot from the virtual HDD then everything else boots from the flash.

I see. Thank you for the help.