To go into more detail,

I have an existing physical 6 drive (4 + parity + cache) UnRAID Plus setup on a separate machine.

I though (naively) that I could just run a physical pass trough of the USB disk and the data drives to a VirtualBox instance and all would be well... Not so much.

Apparently this method chews up the GUIDs and registration fails as well as relabeling the drives with its own VBox super-fun random naming scheme killing the array.

 

The goal here is more hardware consolidation than anything but I want the host machine to still be accessible in a native Windows host so no Xen or ESX.

The host box is very well off CPU/RAM wise, just got to get the array to recognize and registration to hold.

Any pointers?

 

Tried something similar to that, hence the no ESX.

Apparently the board isn't ESX friendly (purple screen) so can't do a video card pass through.

Tried Xen with mixed results with para-virtualization.

Leaving the system open to 3D accelerated games is a must.

 

What would you suggest as the host? UnRAID with a VirtualBox Windows VM?

Or another virtualization solution with UnRAID under it as well?

Thanks ddeeds.

 

The board is a ASUS Z8PE-D12 with 2x Xeon E5620, 96GB RDIMM.

Using the PIKE 2008 module for the additional 8 SAS ports currently controlling 4x SAS drives and 2x SATA drives.

Video wise, it's an NVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

 

Attempted with XenServer 6.2.0 but couldn't get the video/USB to pass through for 'seamless' use.

I'm much more familiar with ESXi, but unfortunately my board bios and ESX past v4 are not compatible.

I am currently running unraid with plgs and a webserver for a W7 VM using the specs as in my signature.

 

I have come to the conclusion (pushed on with the GUI problems of V5 and plugin conflicts with the many different versions of slackware) that i have this the wrong way round and should be running W7 and virtualising unRAID in W7.

 

I have found a few guides for setting up this such as http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=20837.0, i have set this up as a test run successfully but i would like to move my existing unraid to a VM.

 

Is it as simple as adding a new HDD for bootup to W7, setting up an unraid VM and specifying the existing drives and controllers through the VM?

 

Has anyone done this and can give advice?