[GUIDE] Virtualizing unRAID in Xen / KVM on Arch Linux


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Back on topic;

I'm thinking of booting Arch Linux from an external USB3 HD to save a precious internal SATA port for passing through to unRAID.

Can I expect difficulties in this configuration given that the unRAID USB key which is also bootable is also present?

I know I can test this with my MB but I'd need to purchase the SATA3 drive to do it and would like an opinion before going to the expense.

And a supplementary: I would be planning to store VM os/boot disk images on the USB3 drive, will this significantly affect performance in any way?

Peter

Couldn't you get an inexpensive eSATA controller board to use with the external drive? To me that sounds better than USB3, unless you're out of expansion slots.

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I'm being ultra careful about how I plan to delegate ports etc.

 

The machine will run;

 

-Arch Linux

-unRAID VM

-2x Windows HTPCs

 

Ideally I'd like to pass through all my 8x internal SATA ports and 2x more on a PCIe x1 expansion card to unRAID

 

The on board eSATA port is earmarked to passthrough to one of the HTPCs for timeshifting and my other PCI slots are occupied with 2x GPUs for the the HTPCs, TV tuner cards etc.

 

I might have one 4x PCIe slot free when I sort all this out andthere's no guarantee that all the above passing through will work in any case so I might be living with 1x HTPC VM and lots of slots.

 

But just in case, I'm thinking about options.

 

Thanks

 

Peter

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Can I expect difficulties in this configuration given that the unRAID USB key which is also bootable is also present?

Peter

Could you test this by plugging in bootable USB flash drives into both USB ports (one being the USB3 port), and see what happens? The idea being getting around purchase of external USB3 drive.

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I'm thinking of booting Arch Linux from an external USB3 HD to save a precious internal SATA port for passing through to unRAID.

 

Can I expect difficulties in this configuration given that the unRAID USB key which is also bootable is also present?

 

Walk into most any Enterprise Environment... Servers use USB Flash Drive or internal drives / RAID or over the network using NFS, iSCSI, etc. So you aren't doing anything out of the ordinary.

 

Should work like a champ as long as you put the USB drivers in your ramfs. Google Arch booting from USB and it will tell you what to do. It's very easy.

 

And a supplementary: I would be planning to store VM os/boot disk images on the USB3 drive, will this significantly affect performance in any way?

 

I doubt you would notice / care if you buy a halfway decent USB3 hard drive. Does the fact that you Server or VMs boot up a 2 or 3 seconds slower bother you? It wouldn't me.

 

If you were to take every plugin that we have on unRAID (minus the usenet indexer), XBMC and all the other stuff I listed in this thread and ran it on one VM... It'd would still take up less than 1GB of RAM and take up maybe 4GB if you ran a full Linux Desktop.

 

Linux / Apps are going to be in that RAM (less than 1 GB). Unless you have apps that are doing some heavy Database / File activity (like a Usenet Indexer)... Most everything else barely reads or uses the disk.

 

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hmmm damn you for having a valid point ;-)

 

[sigh] well I at least I can say i manged to get what i think is a functional Arch VM+guest additions up and running along with Gnome.  Boy it is quite bare comparatively speaking.  You've got to install EVERYTHING :o  I suppose now maybe I will see if I can successfully create some LV's and move everything there.  You know, for science :o

 

I'll do a blog post on installing Arch in an LVM, it's not hard but there are a couple of steps that need to be performed in a certain order for things to work.

 

As for Arch's bareness, it doesn't install ANYTHING you don't need in order to get a functional booting system. In a way this sucks, especially for new users, but in every other way it is awesome and gives you complete control over what is installed. Having just this week decided to make the switch to Arch full time as my desktop OS from Windows I can definitely empathise that it feels VERY bare at first. I installed cinnamon and it didn't even come with a terminal!! I'm really enjoying getting to grips with this stuff though and am by no means an expert but am slowly improving...

 

As promised...

 

http://blog.ktz.me/?p=387

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The most cost effective Intel processor I could find was an i5 3470 (note not the K model as they don't support vt-d whereas the non K series do). There are tons of cheaper motherboards but none are guaranteed exactly because not only does the chipset (h67 or whatever) need to support vt-d but also your EXACT BIOS revision too.

 

Thanks for this info.  I've started a new thread to discuss hardware requirements for this new model.  It's based on my specific needs/questions, but I hope it will allow others to discuss their hardware needs/wants also.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31428.0

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hmmm damn you for having a valid point ;-)

 

[sigh] well I at least I can say i manged to get what i think is a functional Arch VM+guest additions up and running along with Gnome.  Boy it is quite bare comparatively speaking.  You've got to install EVERYTHING :o  I suppose now maybe I will see if I can successfully create some LV's and move everything there.  You know, for science :o

 

I'll do a blog post on installing Arch in an LVM, it's not hard but there are a couple of steps that need to be performed in a certain order for things to work.

 

As for Arch's bareness, it doesn't install ANYTHING you don't need in order to get a functional booting system. In a way this sucks, especially for new users, but in every other way it is awesome and gives you complete control over what is installed. Having just this week decided to make the switch to Arch full time as my desktop OS from Windows I can definitely empathise that it feels VERY bare at first. I installed cinnamon and it didn't even come with a terminal!! I'm really enjoying getting to grips with this stuff though and am by no means an expert but am slowly improving...

 

As promised...

 

http://blog.ktz.me/?p=387

 

I found using cfdisk slightly easier than fdisk if anyone cares...

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Love it, love it.

 

I myself am moving over to ZFS later today! I just want the SPEED. SnapRAID is attractive I must admit but ZFS always seems to win out in my mind for some reason, realtime parity etc. I know I don't strictly need RT parity but I fancy playing so there!

 

8)

 

For the sake of conversation, when talking about Arch and ZFS, are you referring to the following:

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_ZFS

 

It is always fun to play and while I see no real reason for me to want to break things from their current state, I may venture off to play on a older system I have laying around.

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Well, I spend a lot more of my day on forums!

 

But I get a warm fuzzy feeling. Lol. It's a step learning curve replacing 15 years of windows knowledge with all Linux apps, but I'm trying to remain  patient. All in all I'm happy just miss the familiarity I suppose.

 

I will probably still have a windows VM just to run steam ready for the steaming business which looks sweet.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

 

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Well, I spend a lot more of my day on forums!

 

But I get a warm fuzzy feeling. Lol. It's a step learning curve replacing 15 years of windows knowledge with all Linux apps, but I'm trying to remain  patient. All in all I'm happy just miss the familiarity I suppose.

 

I will probably still have a windows VM just to run steam ready for the steaming business which looks sweet.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah, I am like you, all windows.  Surely I should be able to do everything I do in windows in linux, but it is the warm and fuzzy you note that makes it difficult.  As much as I would want to, I would probably hate myself for doing it, so instead, I just play.

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I'm following parts of this guide in order to get Xen up and running on an Arch build, but when following the section to rebuild libvirt with xen enabled, I get the following error:

 

configure: error: You must install the Xen development package to compile Xen driver with -lxenstore

 

Anybody know what package I need to install? I haven't been able to find one that seems relevant.

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