I've been happily running unRaid for 3 years or so now for file storage and Plex on a Gigabyte MB with 4Gb ram and a Intel Core Duo.

 

Since then we've been using Mac Mini's to serve Plex up to the TV's but with the advent of RasPlex on a Raspberry PI (arrives tomorrow) I'm considering ditching the mini's. This raises a question for me because one of the mini's runs NewzNab and is constantly running scripts to update the DB and theres a lot of HD activity. The unRaid server itself runs Sickbeard, Sab and transcodes media to web clients.

 

So it seems one option is to virtualize with unRaid and my OS X Newnab machine all on one server. Is EXSI the only way to do this? Is the build process documented/easy?

 

Any suggestions on builds for this? I have an 18Tb array via 11 disks.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

Check out the esxi ATLAS thread for the most comprehensive info, you might also check out my VM pointers thread.

 

It is REALLY easy with respect to what you need to do. First check however is find out if your hardware is suited:

 

It is highly adviced to "passthru'' your disks (or actually; your disk controllers) directly to the unraid VM, this means that your disks will not be "virtualised" but the hardware is directly linked to the vm instance running unraid, there are other ways of doing this but they are far more work, are less performing. I know of noone running unraid succesfully in production (so not test) without this:

 

- you need to have a processor that does VT-d (check out your processor specs);

- you need to link your disk controllers to the specific unraid vm, drawback is that those controllers are ONLY available to the unraid vm and for other vm''s OR the esxi system itself. Consequently you need to have all your unraid disks on external controllers and not on your mainboard. That leaves your motherboard controllers available for esxi itself and possibly other vm's.

 

If you have that then just try it out, esxi is free, it will cost you a couple of hours to set it up and the whole process is not intrusive to unraid (it does not change anything to the usb drive), so if it does not work just plug in your unraid usb stick, reboot and you are back in old style.

Thanks for the reply. Some useful info there!

And so extremely easy to maintain... Probably one of the best things I did to my setup in the last years... Want to try a new thing ?  Just create a new vm to try it out.. Takes 5 minutes to have a completely new ubuntu system running... I even used it to try out windows8... I would not see it is fluent enough to use it as permanent system (with windows), but it worked great for trying it out.. With linux I do not notice a difference between bare metal and vm..