The (un)official unRAID 6.x plugin discussion thread

[SchoolBusDriver]

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools

 

I love that I found a list of management tools, I hate what the list says.  The only one that seems interesting is kimchi.  Everything else reads as bloated or commercial.  Something lightweight to manage the VMs is what we need out of this.

 

There is a thread in the Virtualization Section where a bunch of us have tried many of the tools and give feedback. Someone even wrote a guide for how to install one of them.

 

Might be time to revive it instead of starting from ground zero again.

 

I'd love to launch a VM for the types of tools that Influencer wrote plugins for, and then another VM for something like my DHCP and DNS servers.  I just need something that's fairly easy to do it in.

 

They already have VM appliances for Xen, KVM and ESXi... An OS with X, Y and Z installed and ready to go. Granted there aren't any that I have seen with the plugins Influencer and others have made but it's fairly simple to do.

[drawz]

nicinabox - i'm not sure what it is about boiler and the other tools you have developed, but they seem intimidating for some reason. your ideas are great and i was super excited about all of them when you announced them, including the Web GUI and boiler, but for some reason it feels like there is a barrier to entry that I think most users are not willing to go through. I think if you unified your GUI and package/plugin manager (which should run from the GUI primarily), you'd really make some progress. The lack of plugins availability is an issue too - it's a chicken and egg thing.

 

Agree that limetech picking and recommending one solution would go a long way. For some reason, Tom seems to want to reinvent the wheel and only allow himself to develop anything official for unraid (see the webgui on github, which is a stripped down version of simplefeatures it seems).

[BLKMGK]

Oh good - back to plug-in talk, yay!

 

Some thoughts - I think we'll always have plugins to some degree. Whether this is for simple email notifications, a nicer GUI, UPS support, or other small things I think that unRAID will always need to have ways of adding some functions to the base OS. Even virtualized I have a few small ones on mine and to quote another I too have "plugin fuckery" with some things broken. With 6.x I intend to strip to a bare install and try not to let that happen again! To manage this I *think* (without yet having used it) that Boiler smells good and looks like a good option. If it can handle preventing the weird conflicts I and others have found then terrific, I'll try it with 6.x myself. If someone decides to write a plugin for SAB, Sick, and whatever else crazy thing and others like it vs virtualizing then again - terrific! I would say that getting into that realm though does take you out of the humble simple user realm for sure though, don't kid yourself. Docker ALSO looks interesting with the added benefit that it's apparently got a community building all sorts of applications and functionality for it. I watched the lengthy video, I came away impressed, I'm not sure at all how to get that integrated into unRAID or how exactly it works - tiny VMs? I like that you can quickly barf up snapshots to a cloud in the sky and apparently share them - that might make some users VERY happy as it could grow functionality greatly.

 

All that said I like virtualization since not everything I wish to tinker with should be intermingled (IMO) with the software that's storing my TBs worth of p0rn!   I currently run ESXi 5.5 and I believe that some of the "restrictions" on things like memory were actually LIFTED with this version not cut. VMware does weird things like shrink and expand restrictions with each release. <shrug> I do NOT like that I cannot easily clone or move VMs like I can on the licensed stuff at work but hey they gotta' make money too. Passthrough is working perfectly fine on my system and my system is even hacked to allow OSX to be installed. Hint: it doesn't work so well IMO.

 

Given a choice and some management tools I'll gladly jump ship to KVM or Xen with others, I note that Xenserver has a conversion tool for ESX to Xen (OVA) and some management tools that I wonder about working with more up to date Xen. I'm actually going to try out Xenserver as a distro since it looks easy enough when I get my testbed up and I was sad to see a post indicating it's not up to the same speed as the other distro. For those of us who wish to just explore Xen is there a "best" way to do so while unRAID spins up? I tried briefly on Mint and hit a wall, I suspect my hardware may not have been capable hence resurrecting something else. Right now I'm just jumping in place trying to get hardware up for testing. I'm confused as heck at the differences between KVM and Xen and am trusting Grumpy when he says KVM is easier and just as fast so if there's tools I'm sold. I don't care which one becomes popular and in the meantime I sit on ESX fat dumb and happy.

 

Lastly, I know that some users are confused and maybe a little freaked out at some of us being so excited about virtualization. Some of these folks worry that their world is about to get turned upside down and complicated. I hope that those of us who are excited about this change in the unRAID kernel can try and let the folks who just want simple know that this isn't going to ruin their world. That if they don't want to flip the switch and turn on virtualization that they will still be just fine. Core unRAID isn't going to change other than maybe going 64bit. This is still all about storing files in a unique way that offers the same protections it always has. There will still be help for them and they won't be forced to build some multi thousand dollar beast of a box. I run (currently) three different unRAID boxes. Two of them are in the basements of friends - they make great holiday gifts! These folks just want to store files and will almost certainly never virtualize stuff like I do at home. So, I understand the desire for an appliance - I don't think Tom has any desire to take that away and neither do the rest of us. Ignore the folks like myself who are excited about the new shiny 

 

P.S. Someone said somewhere something about XBMC versions moving slowly. I have two of those systems - neither virtualized - running on Haswell NUCs. One runs OpenElec nightlies and it's VERY well put together with lots of cutting edge patches for video quality etc. Make OpenElec a VM or plug-in if you want something sorted out very well! The second NUC runs a full desktop with source pulled from GIT and compiled by me regularly. From where I stand XBMC moves way faster than a rev every so often and it's damned neat seeing new features appear and get polished up.