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Hi all,

 

What would people recommend and be most stable out of the two following options:

 

A) Run unraid as the host system with virtual box plugin installed and then running a virtual machine with things like sickbeard, couchpotato, tv headend or myth tv etc

 

or

 

B) Run another host os with virtual box running an unraid virtual machine and sickbeard, couchpotato,  tv headend or myth tv etc  running in another virtual machine.

 

 

Thanks, advice greatly received :)

 

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What is your hardware?

 

If you do not have ESXi enabled HW then I suggest going with unRAID and VirtualBox with another OS virtualized for your download apps (I do it - Windows 7).

 

If your virtual OS gets unstable then just reinstall it without jeopardizing unRAID.

 

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I'd argue that your goal [ "Most Stable" ] is best achieved by doing NEITHER of the options you've listed.

 

Use a dedicated UnRAID platform; and put the rest on another system altogether  :)

 

I agree, however, that of the two options you've listed, (a) is "more stable" ... but a dedicated box is definitely the "most stable" approach.

 

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I'd argue that your goal [ "Most Stable" ] is best achieved by doing NEITHER of the options you've listed.

 

Use a dedicated UnRAID platform; and put the rest on another system altogether  :)

 

With his hardware I'd agree with you. But virtualizing operating systems does not make it inherently less stable if you have the proper hardware .

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I'd argue that your goal [ "Most Stable" ] is best achieved by doing NEITHER of the options you've listed.

 

Use a dedicated UnRAID platform; and put the rest on another system altogether  :)

 

With his hardware I'd agree with you. But virtualizing operating systems does not make it inherently less stable if you have the proper hardware .

 

In my particular case moving to vmware and therefor splitting off functionality in different vm''s on the same physical hardware that ran all of them bare-bone before (as plugins) has lead to a system that is actually MORE stable... Also the possibility to use snapshot before trying something new has -drastically- increased my uptime and lowered my frustration :-)

 

However that was only possible because my hardware setup was (by accident) fully capable of running vmware (with the exception of the need to change out the processor)

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I presume you're running ESXi with the UnRAID drives all passed directly through to the UnRAID VM.

 

Just curious what the rest of your config is like (what OS's; what functionality on each; etc.).    I agree the Snapshot capability is a GREAT feature ... I use it all the time on my VMs.  But I've not virtualized UnRAID ... I keep it on a dedicated box (although if I was starting over ...)

 

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I have all my array drives on two MV8's, both MV8''s are passthru''d to the unraid VM. Unraid VM boots from the regular usb drive according to the instructions in the Atlas thread.

 

Basically if I change my boot sequence of my box it will boot from the usb again and run bare metal, when I set it up I figured that would be a nice backout procedure but I never had to use it.

 

VM is running with 4 gigs and 2 cores thin provisioned. It only runs stock unraid, cache_dirs and airvideo.

 

I then have a second VM (ubuntu 32, I call it MediaBeast) running Sabnzbd, Couchpotato, Sickbeard, Transmission, Spotweb and Maraschino. This VM is also running thin provisioned with 4gigs and 2 cores.

 

I have a third VM standing by with a test unraid (making use of a second usb stick and the VM distribution of 12a as provided in another thread in this forum), I will use that for testing and preclears. To make preclears work I have ordered a cheap 2port sata card that I will also passthru, but to the test-unraid. I will have 2 dedicated sata bays in my cabinet. When a preclear is finished I just have to move the drive to a slot belonging to the MV8's.

 

The MediaBeast VM mounts drives (thru CIFS) from the unraid VM (movies, series and a temp drive). All downloading is done on array drives.

 

All VM''s have VMXNET3 adaptors in VM to make sure they talk to each other using the virtual switch.

 

That;s about it really... As soon as I had the VT-d capable processor installed it took me only an hour or two to get unraid to work (really takes about 15 minutes, but I made it a point to read the atlas thread really carefully).

 

Setting up MediaBeast takes 2 hours, in real life I spent two weeks on it but that was because I could not get Couchpotato to work, in the end it appeard there was an issue with couchpotato itself and the developper needed to make a code change, now it works.

 

It is amazing to me that virtualisation is so simple...

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