Looks like tRAID v1.0 is out has anyone had a look at it?

 

Going to put it on my test server and see how i get on with it and how well it plays.

 

If I'm honest i may even move over to it as got a few more drives to put in my server and the thought of 1 parity drive covering all them drives is starting to scare me a little.

 

At the moment my max is 12 drives 11 data 1 parity with tRAID i could have 2 parity covering 10 drives, something i would be happier with.

 

This thread isn't meant to be a staging ground for which is better or the importance of backups, I'm just interested in the honest facts of those who have played with / tested it or use it.

No, plan to have a look at it shortly though. It's a clear competitor to unraid though especially if (inevitably) someone wraps it up as either an appliance or as a bundle to also install other management stacks ontop of a generic Linux install.

 

This does presume it works however..!

I played with a couple of rc versions in an virtualbox install on win7 and it appeared to function as advertised i was able to live expand and contract the array, rebuild a dropped disk, the data was all still there, but would like to hear from those who have more experience testing these sort of things.

 

If i moved over to the dark side i would still have to use unraid on my test box to preclear my disks as i know of nothing that comes close or gives me confidence in a disk like 3 passes of joe's Pre clear script.

 

Does such a tool exist on windows?

 

 

It's just a shame no eta on the Linux client yet.

I wonder how much better it is over simply using  BTRFS.

 

I know that BTRFS does not have ALL the features tooted for tRaid.

like being able to add disk with existing data and different FS to the array etc.

but how important that is I am not sure.

 

I didn't think btrfs did non-striped 'raid' configurations - like unraid and traid.

Its the sleeping and spinning up only the required disk that got me interested in unRaid in the first place. I believe tRAID for Linux development will continue in the next month or so.

I don't think is does.

but frankly not sure how important it is though.

 

I mean we used RAID for years and were happy with it.

it works and works well.

 

 

non-striped raid advantage is that each disk is readable  outside of array.

it is a good option but the whole point of raid is high availability of data and better recovery option for hardware failure.

you get that form regular raid config.

with BTRFS you get all that , plus built in data integrity  and self healing,

lesser fragmentation since it is a CoW type FS. I say it is a good set of options already.

add to that that fact that you do not need additional utility for RAID as it is build in into FS

and no need for LVM as it is built in into FS and you get very good option with  BTRFS for many uses.

 

tRaid simply a try for competition to UnRaid (as it is even advertised as such )with some bells and whistles added but not much to be very compelling at this time, if ever.

 

I do not feel that ability to run on  any OS as opposed to a specifically chosen OS is an advantage in this case. as well as being able to use drives with different FS with in an array.

it is always better to have a homogeneous  environment in this kind of usage.

it is also better to test the disk you want to add to array before doing so.

 

IMHO

I mean we used RAID for years and were happy with it.

it works and works well.

 

Depends how you define happy with it

 

For the home space I certainly wasn't. If you're running unraid you presumably want the benefits of non-striped protection as well.

 

non-striped raid advantage is that each disk is readable  outside of array.

it is a good option but the whole point of raid is high availability of data and better recovery option for hardware failure.

you get that form regular raid config.

 

Unstriped raid would seem to me to be better for availability and recovery. If you lose more than one disk (presuming raid5) you lose the whole array. With unraid (or analagous non striped alternatives) if you lose more than one disk you can still natively read all other disks. Much better chance of seeing your data again. This is a very. very big bonus over striped raid.

 

with BTRFS you get all that , plus built in data integrity  and self healing,

lesser fragmentation since it is a CoW type FS. I say it is a good set of options already.

add to that that fact that you do not need additional utility for RAID as it is build in into FS

and no need for LVM as it is built in into FS and you get very good option with  BTRFS for many uses.

 

That's nice - if you want striped raid. If you want all those things badly then zfs has been doing it for years already, there has been no need to wait for btrfs - even under linux. It would seem odd to compare it to unraid as it's not the same.

 

tRaid simply a try for competition to UnRaid (as it is even advertised as such )with some bells and whistles added but not much to be very compelling at this time, if ever.

 

It's the only real time non striped parity product I'm aware of other than unraid (or the not very good implementation in flexraids snapshot raid system). So it's existence is quite significant regardless of current level of feature set.

 

I do not feel that ability to run on  any OS as opposed to a specifically chosen OS is an advantage in this case. as well as being able to use drives with different FS with in an array.

it is always better to have a homogeneous  environment in this kind of usage.

 

It gives you more chance of data recovery and better flexibility in the platform to run on. I'd see that as a bonus but open to individual interpretation.

 

it is also better to test the disk you want to add to array before doing so.

 

That has nothing to do with anything - you can test any disk before you put it in any system regardless of OS or specific storage implementation. I doubt anyone would disagree that it's a sensible thing to do.

 

I do not feel that ability to run on  any OS as opposed to a specifically chosen OS is an advantage in this case. as well as being able to use drives with different FS with in an array.

it is always better to have a homogeneous  environment in this kind of usage.

 

It gives you more chance of data recovery and better flexibility in the platform to run on. I'd see that as a bonus but open to individual interpretation.

 

This was another reason for me looking i know i can probably do all the things i was thinking with unRaid plugins but development can sometimes be very very very slow and for someone who's not as experienced as others it can be a real pain in the butt to get a plugin running because of this dependency and that.

 

I don't want bleeding edge but its nice to just install a new version of said plugin on a supported platform and not have to wait to see if someone can come up with a way to bodge things together to get it running.

 

I do not feel that ability to run on  any OS as opposed to a specifically chosen OS is an advantage in this case. as well as being able to use drives with different FS with in an array.

it is always better to have a homogeneous  environment in this kind of usage.

 

It gives you more chance of data recovery and better flexibility in the platform to run on. I'd see that as a bonus but open to individual interpretation.

 

This was another reason for me looking i know i can probably do all the things i was thinking with unRaid plugins but development can sometimes be very very very slow and for someone who's not as experienced as others it can be a real pain in the butt to get a plugin running because of this dependency and that.

 

I don't want bleeding edge but its nice to just install a new version of said plugin on a supported platform and not have to wait to see if someone can come up with a way to bodge things together to get it running.

 

well I personally prefer virtualization  over plug-ins.

 

That's all dependent on the equipment and budget you have. I don't have the budget to build an new sever to host vm's so I'll try get best out of what I have.

 

@boof i would be interested in your take on tRAID if you decide to test it.

 

And any others of course.

That's all dependent on the equipment and budget you have. I don't have the budget to build an new sever to host vm's so I'll try get best out of what I have.

 

well aside from not enough RAM you should be able to build VM server on your existing setup

using Xen or KVM.

maybe a BIOS update on MB is needed but it seams that it should support AMD IOMMU(AMD-V)

so don't see a problem here

Good to know but at this time I have no real interest in VM's maybe in future.

 

More interested in those if any that have played with tRAID :-)

Just tried to use TRaid.  It's been kind of a pain so far.  First, I had to find a wiki page buried on the site just to figure out how to login to the web interface.  Once I got into the web interface, I got an error when trying to add any hosts.  What a POS.

That's all dependent on the equipment and budget you have. I don't have the budget to build an new sever to host vm's so I'll try get best out of what I have.

 

well aside from not enough RAM you should be able to build VM server on your existing setup

using Xen or KVM.

maybe a BIOS update on MB is needed but it seams that it should support AMD IOMMU(AMD-V)

so don't see a problem here

 

Played with tRAID a little more not sure I want to use it instead of unRAID now, unRAID just works and i love it for that fact, tRAID seems alot more long winded but i do like the fact i can have multiple parity drives though, Ill keep playing though.

 

My board currently has 4GB ram in it and only 2 slots so i could update to 8GB, If i was to try Xen, not heard of KVM (guess loads to learn) I would only really want to run vanilla unRIAD and one other vm (win7) for serviio, torrent client and maybe a web-server to test stuff in, was thinking of trying own-cloud also. Idea being to keep this as lite as possible.

 

I could try all this out on my micro server first for learning purposes the translate what Ive learnt over to the actual server once I'm comfortable I'm not going to screw my data up, but that said i could bump into all sorts of hardware issues moving to server.

 

This would be something total new to me can you point me toward any guides?

the issue is most often is the hardware compatibility with the virtualization platform you want to use.

 

but the lay-down is the most popular virt. platform, especially in here is VmWare ESXi/Sphere.

it is the most stable and tried platform so far. but it comes not with its issues and shortcomings, just like everything else.

 

KVM and Xen are two very similar products in terms that they are basically a native Linux virtualization  platform that are part of Linux Core Kernel. KVM more so compared to Xen,

but some how where/is less popular.

I guess Citrix XenServer have pushed the Xen usage further into Linux infrastructure.

also maybe the fact that Xen is lot less restrictive in hardware compatibility thus allowing the  use  of more diverse hardware base. KVM greatly depends on Hardware based Virtualization assistance aka  VT-d/AMD-v/IOMMU protocols when it comes to special features like PCI- pass through and such.

 

saying that, I have read up on tRaid and frankly I think is is not ready for big time yet. too raw, too immature yet.

 

also I do believe that with a little work you can build out a good file server using just native FS and OS. granted it will not have ALL the bells and whistles of UnRaid type setup but it might work just as well and maybe even better in some cases.

 

I have been trying to virtualize unRaid for the last several month, my self.

unfortunately I did not do a thorough  research ahead of time  and got a server from TAMs

which is a great setup for the money if only thing you want it to run UnRaid.

but my goal was VM server runing unRaid and more.

the hardware is simply not compartible with virt. it does not 100% support the IOMMU protocol so ESXi will not do pass through, neither will XenServer.

Xen/KVM also do not work consistently with this feature.

so my plans to do unRaid in VM  is on indefinite hold .

but I am trying the setup using OpenSuse with  BTRFS for data share instead of UnRaid.

 

I started with OpenSuse 12.3 (it was the stable release at the time)

but I am trying a 13.1 RC2 right now.

 

BTRFS let you have multiple disks volume using mixed disks and provides a RAID 5/6 support natively thus you can have multi parity setup.

you do not get a good GUI interface to set it up like unRaid but with OpenSuse you can use a base KDE or Gnome UI.

or if server setup Webmin/ISPConfig

you have Yast to do almost any thing you want on the server instead of CLI.

I think only OpenSuse have such robust and capable system manager that is available even in console mode(yes they have a console mode yast. it looks like midnight commander but works very nicely. )

 

you have info utility you can use for system health and info,

 

BTRFS gives you ability to have multi-device file system with built-in Raid capability.

it is now supports RAID 0,1,5,6,10 right in the file system, no need for mddam or anything else.

you also do not need LVM as the BTRFS have similar capability natively.

it offers data integrity and self healing  as well as fragmentation proof ability as it is a CoW type FS.

 

so if I figure out a proper setup I might just use it instead of UnRaid.

yes it is not as convenient and user friendly and it requires me to learn Linux more deeply than I would otherwise (which might be a plus in it self).

but it is a viable  alternative IMHO.

 

 

 

 

My N54L with 8GB memory is using VirtualBox on unRAID.  I have 3 VMs defined:  2 x Win7x86 and 1 WHSv1.  So far no problems been up 1-2 weeks.  The WHSv1 VM has 4 drives RDM'd "by id" like unRAID 5.0 does it so that if they come up in unRAID with different letters they still map correctly to the VM.  Those 4 drives are laptop drives that are underneath the optical drive bay.  I'm using a "Double Twin" in the optical bay to add two 3.5" drives internal and a two bay enclosure for my cache and parity drives external off eSata port.  That gives me 6 data drives 1 parity and 1 cache drive for unRAID and 4 laptop drives for WHSv1.  The 2 Win7x86 are using virtual HDDs defined in VirtualBox on the cache drive.

So i get this straight in my head, i take it you install xenserver on a spare disk in machine (would have to buy another 2 port card as want the 6x onboard and 8x on my M1015 passed to unRAID) and, then install a xencenter??  (watched a few videos don't understand yet) which will allow you to configure and set up your VM's  on the server right.

 

Like i said earlier 1x VM for pure unraid and then another for all my bits and pieces, torrent client, web-server, serviio, own-cloud, ubuntu maybe.

 

Looks like it could be alot of fun to play with if my very basic understanding is correct and only costing me a 2 port card for the xenserver and vm storage and some extra ram.

So i get this straight in my head, i take it you install xenserver on a spare disk in machine (would have to buy another 2 port card as want the 6x onboard and 8x on my M1015 passed to unRAID) and, then install a xencenter??  (watched a few videos don't understand yet) which will allow you to configure and set up your VM's  on the server right.

 

Like i said earlier 1x VM for pure unraid and then another for all my bits and pieces, torrent client, web-server, serviio, own-cloud, ubuntu maybe.

 

Looks like it could be alot of fun to play with if my very basic understanding is correct and only costing me a 2 port card for the xenserver and vm storage and some extra ram.

 

sort of,

you can install XenServer on a USB stick thus sparing the sata port.(you need at least 16GB stick)

and Xencenter is Windows app that you install on windows PC to mange the server.

 

the easy way is:

1. disconnect all HDD from the server

2. plug the USB stick you want to use in.

3. boot server using install CD or usb stick  with XenServer install on it.(there are plenty hoto on line on how to create an installation USB for xenserver)

4.  go through the setup and choose the usb as target drive. let it format it and install it.

5. at some point it will seams as the install is hung up. let it sit there for 20-30 min if needed, I have learned this the hard way scrapping the install after 5 min wait thinking it hung. some times it needs time configuring the drivers and stuff, and it depends on your hardware.

 

6. once installed, power down the server and connect your drives back.

make sure your server bios is configured to boot from the new USB stick  first not harddrive

don't forget to remove the install cd/usb on reboot.

7. boot your new server.

 

8. install XenCenter on windows PC. (FYI if you navigate to your server IP in the browser it will bring the webpage with the link to the XenCenter download but you can download this from Citrix directly.)

fire up the xencenter app and add the server to it.

 

create new VM as per instructions you need.

for Xen based unraid download the image file from a thread here.

search Xen / Xenserver  , there is a thread from ddeeds here with all  the instructions.

 

Hmm may need to get a bigger stick biggest I got is 8gb lol don't really use them anymore.

 

Was thinking a cheapish 2 out sata card with a small HDD or ssd on it.

 

How much memory would you recommend, 8gb?

 

This could be fun.

 

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

 

 

Hmm may need to get a bigger stick biggest I got is 8gb lol don't really use them anymore.

 

Was thinking a cheapish 2 out sata card with a small HDD or ssd on it.

 

How much memory would you recommend, 8gb?

 

This could be fun.

 

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

 

for testing use 8GB stick will do. if you want to run from the usb you will need at least 16GB.

RAM is up to you  but 8GB is a minimum I would consider if pressed, but more is better.

again as a test you can even make do with 4GB

but this will only alow you to run maybe an unraid and a small light use linux distro.

if you want a windows VM you need more ram.

 

Forgot to say thanks for the how to I look forward to having a play this weekend provided I get 5min to myself lol, if all goes well and appears to function as it should and i get unRAID running again ill get the memory upgraded and the USB size increased.

 

I hope i can get it going but if I'm honest i have a feeling it wont, my server was built on a budget and hasn't got the newest and greatest kit in it. Only tryint it will tell lol.

 

How does having xen boot off USB effect the life of the stick, are there lots of read and writes? I think this is why i prefer the idea of installing it to a HDD/SSD I have a small 250GB HDD that came with the micro sever i could use.

 

I take it with unRAID in a VM it will spin-down the drives and what not and my ups will be able to shutdown the server correctly in the event of a power-cut?

 

Trivial questions but I'll admit i know next to nothing at the moment.

 

Forgot to say thanks for the how to I look forward to having a play this weekend provided I get 5min to myself lol, if all goes well and appears to function as it should and i get unRAID running again ill get the memory upgraded and the USB size increased.

 

I hope i can get it going but if I'm honest i have a feeling it wont, my server was built on a budget and hasn't got the newest and greatest kit in it. Only tryint it will tell lol.

 

How does having xen boot off USB effect the life of the stick, are there lots of read and writes? I think this is why i prefer the idea of installing it to a HDD/SSD I have a small 250GB HDD that came with the micro sever i could use.

 

I take it with unRAID in a VM it will spin-down the drives and what not and my ups will be able to shutdown the server correctly in the event of a power-cut?

 

Trivial questions but I'll admit i know next to nothing at the moment.

well  I know that it is possible to run XenServer off USB stick, not sure how it affect the expected life of it.

but it is a good way of testing if it works.

after all you can always reinstall it on an HDD or SSD if all is working.

 

if you have an SSD available now,  install on it and if it works you will not have to redo all later.

I take it i need to get the:

Installation ISO

XenCenter Windows Management Console

 

From here:

http://www.xenserver.org/overview-xenserver-open-source-virtualization/download.html