Virtualbox works wonderfukly and very stable even with windiws as a vm;-)

 

How long have you been running it ontop of unraid?

I've personally had virtualbox running on unraid 4.7 for a couple years now. It's never given me any problems after I got past a certain version of virtualbox, I think 4.0.8 or something. Prior to that I had disk timeout issues on the guest OS, but it never caused any issues at all with unraid itself. Currently I run an XP, a minecraft server, and a general use xubuntu up all the time, and have many others that are only run when needed, mainly because of RAM shortages with too many guests running at once. It sure is nice to have that xp running with logmein, it makes secure remote access to my LAN pretty much hassle free.

That's pretty interesting.  I'm not much of a linux guy (working on it) so I haven't used vbox much.  I've been using it for a bit on my work laptop on top of linux mint so I can still use outlook and visio and has been pretty good.

 

That's the beauty of this stuff, there's never an absolute way of doing things. 

mainly because of RAM shortages with too many guests running at once.

 

This would be the limiting factor of Virtual Box on unRAID.

A 32 bit os running multiple 32bit OS's.

 

usually, Unix guests, do not require as much ram as a windows guest.

 

 

mainly because of RAM shortages with too many guests running at once.

 

This would be the limiting factor of Virtual Box on unRAID.

A 32 bit os running multiple 32bit OS's.

 

usually, Unix guests, do not require as much ram as a windows guest.

Frankly, I'm probably going to stay with 4.7 until unraid goes 64 bit. I have enough storage with 2TB drives, and everything just works right now.

With the nicely done Virtualbox add-in that lainie maintains on this forum, it's very simple to install.

 

For hardware that isn't ESXi compatible, it's an excellent option for isolating plugins and perhaps doing a few other tasks [e.g. maintaining a minimal XP install to run LogMeIn is a nice way to allow secure access from anywhere, as Jonathanm does]

 

The 4GB RAM constraint shouldn't be an issue if you're only running a Linux VM for add-ons and an XP VM for LogMeIn.

 

Your i5-2500k is VERY adequate for doing this 

mainly because of RAM shortages with too many guests running at once.

 

This would be the limiting factor of Virtual Box on unRAID.

A 32 bit os running multiple 32bit OS's.

 

usually, Unix guests, do not require as much ram as a windows guest.

With the ITX board only has 2 RAM slots so I can't really stuff a ton in there to begin with. I currently have 4GB in there, but I have 8GB that I can swap into it when the time comes.

mainly because of RAM shortages with too many guests running at once.

 

This would be the limiting factor of Virtual Box on unRAID.

A 32 bit os running multiple 32bit OS's.

 

usually, Unix guests, do not require as much ram as a windows guest.

With the ITX board only has 2 RAM slots so I can't really stuff a ton in there to begin with. I currently have 4GB in there, but I have 8GB that I can swap into it when the time comes.

I have 8GB of RAM and it works just fine for 2 or 3 guests running at the same time.

Caveat:  I don't use VirtualBox, so I can't confirm this (perhaps Jonathanm can),  HOWEVER ...

 

VirtualBox has a "PAE" setting you can enable.  I do NOT know if it's enabled in the config that lainie makes available, but I'd guess it is.

 

... and UnRAID is compiled with a PAE kernel

 

==> So, you should get the full benefit of all your installed RAM for use with VM's.    i.e. don't wait to install your 8GB 

Caveat:  I don't use VirtualBox, so I can't confirm this (perhaps Jonathanm can),  HOWEVER ...

 

VirtualBox has a "PAE" setting you can enable.  I do NOT know if it's enabled in the config that lainie makes available, but I'd guess it is.

 

... and UnRAID is compiled with a PAE kernel

 

==> So, you should get the full benefit of all your installed RAM for use with VM's.    i.e. don't wait to install your 8GB 

Sweetness!

Caveat:  I don't use VirtualBox, so I can't confirm this (perhaps Jonathanm can),  HOWEVER ...

 

VirtualBox has a "PAE" setting you can enable.  I do NOT know if it's enabled in the config that lainie makes available, but I'd guess it is.

 

... and UnRAID is compiled with a PAE kernel

 

==> So, you should get the full benefit of all your installed RAM for use with VM's.    i.e. don't wait to install your 8GB 

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Caveat:  I don't use VirtualBox, so I can't confirm this (perhaps Jonathanm can),  HOWEVER ...

 

VirtualBox has a "PAE" setting you can enable.  I do NOT know if it's enabled in the config that lainie makes available, but I'd guess it is.

 

... and UnRAID is compiled with a PAE kernel

 

==> So, you should get the full benefit of all your installed RAM for use with VM's.    i.e. don't wait to install your 8GB 

A picture is worth a thousand words.

What exactly are we looking at here? Is this using unRAID as a host or as a VM?

BTW, I fired up the machine tonight. The hardware upgrade is a success so all the specs I listed before are up and running, and it's rolling with 8GB of RAM. I still need to get a cache drive into it, but I'm pulling a 128GB SSD from another machine. I just need to make sure there's nothing important on it, first.

What exactly are we looking at here? Is this using unRAID as a host or as a VM?

That is a screenshot of phpvirtualbox, which is a webpage management utility for the command line version of virtualbox that runs on unraid.

 

In this instance, unraid is the host OS, and I have a couple low memory usage guests running.

What exactly are we looking at here? Is this using unRAID as a host or as a VM?

That is a screenshot of phpvirtualbox, which is a webpage management utility for the command line version of virtualbox that runs on unraid.

 

In this instance, unraid is the host OS, and I have a couple low memory usage guests running.

Ok, thanks. That's actually what I figured, but I didn't want to sound like an idiot if I was wrong.  Very nice!

And here is a screenshot running 5 guests, Windows 7, XP, Slackware 13.37, Pardus, and xubuntu 12.04.

BTW, this is on unraid 4.7 with Sick,Sab,CouchV2, and unraidweb by bubba, plus a BUNCH of other stuff running. I really dread moving this machine to 5.0, I may just leave it as is, it runs so well.

 

(from /usr/bin/free -l)

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8314024    7764436     549588          0      58956    2514376
Low:        837920     492364     345556
High:      7476104    7272072     204032
-/+ buffers/cache:    5191104    3122920
Swap:            0          0          0

 

This is the memory reported by unraid with all those virtualbox guests running and all my other addons.

 

I really want 64 bit unraid.

And here is a screenshot running 5 guests, Windows 7, XP, Slackware 13.37, Pardus, and xubuntu 12.04.

On a Core 2 Duo? That seems pretty brave.

And here is a screenshot running 5 guests, Windows 7, XP, Slackware 13.37, Pardus, and xubuntu 12.04.

On a Core 2 Duo? That seems pretty brave.

Virtualbox seems to be pretty good at slicing up the cpu time. Nothing ever gets completely unusable, but some things can be a little slow at times. 

Very nice jonathan.

 

My Q25B system is designed for very low power, so I'm just using a D525 Atom ... but I think my next one will use a Haswell 4770S and I'll set up Virtualbox.    I had been thinking about setting up a nice ESXi system to run several VMs, but it looks to me like Virtualbox  would pretty much do what I want without the need for pass-through controllers; Xeons; etc.  A single VM to "play" a bit with add-ons (allowing UnRAID to stay a "pure NAS");  perhaps one for XP to run LogMeIn so I can get trivial remote access to everything; and perhaps one or two more just for grins [May set up two VMs for add-ons ... a "stable" one for those I definitely want to keep and have configured the way I want; and one to "play" with].

 

An i7-4770 will have more-than-enough "oomph" to handle that 

With an i7-4770, you should have enough left over for NASA mission control. :-) My own Q25B was running an E-350 (AMD's answer to the Atom) before I upgraded.

I am running a 14 drive (7 used) build with a D510 CPU with 4GB RAM and running a Windows 7 VM (800MB RAM) mainly for torrenting (with https which isn't supported by the utorrent plugin ALPHA version).

Working on the VM is very slow but downloading is just fine.

 

It all depends on what you are doing on the VM - DISK or CPU?

 

I am running a 14 drive (7 used) build with a D510 CPU with 4GB RAM and running a Windows 7 VM (800MB RAM) mainly for torrenting (with https which isn't supported by the utorrent plugin ALPHA version).

Working on the VM is very slow but downloading is just fine.

 

It all depends on what you are doing on the VM - DISK or CPU?

Both. I'll be downloading, but there will probably be transcoding. If I can manage to tweak a Mac OS X VM then I already have a workflow to auto-convert my mkv's. Otherwise I'll have to transcode.

FWIW, it looks like successful hackintosh builds have been done with this board. Just got to see what virtualbox will and won't allow for an OSX VM.

 

If all else fails, I'll go back to Ubuntu, but I'd like to give OSX a shot first. It's what I use around the rest of my house.

Just got to see what virtualbox will and won't allow for an OSX VM.

Good luck. Let me know if you get something running, I banged my head against that for a few hours and called it quits. Theoretically it's unofficially doable, but the official line from virtualbox is no OSX on non-apple hardware. This strange line of code was apparently supposed to help, but it didn't seem to do much. Maybe I was holding my mouth wrong.

VBoxManage setextradata "Mac OSX" "VBoxInternal2/SmcDeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"

 

Moderators, if I stepped over a line here, feel free to edit my post.

I've found a technique that I'm going to try to get OS X to play nice with virtualbox.

 

I was considering using OS X Server, but I've used it before, and it wasn't my favorite. The biggest advantage is roaming profiles for my other computers, but between SSL certificates, dynamic DNS, firewall configuration, and the constant threat of having your hackintosh fail, it becomes more trouble than its worth.

 

Maybe I'll give it another shot and maybe I won't. If I do, I'm going to reduce the headaches by only allowing syncing on the local network.