January 23, 201412 yr So with the arrival of unRAID 6.0 yesterday, I was a little disappointed to learn that support for KVM PCI passthrough was unlikely to work until a future beta with a kernel update. I'd been waiting for this version to use as a VM host but since that wait will take a little longer and with a couple of days off work, I decided to see how it played as a VM. I set up ManjaroBox on my test machine and got virt-manager up and running along with a bridged network. (I've really grown to like this distro and it gives me a desktop to work in, which is nice) Anyway, plugged in an unRAID stick, set up a VM and passed through the stick in virt-manager and booted. Straight into unRAID... I've got to say, it was VERY easy with no requirement to use, download or compile anything custom. Next I'll try passthrough of some SATA controllers and get some drives attached. Liking this so far!
January 23, 201412 yr Author And just like that.... Passing my AMD SATA Controller to the VM and adding a few 500GB HDs, I have an array. Running parity sync at the moment and getting a respectable > 80MB/s. That's pretty special to me considering my current set up gives me ~20MB/s. A small issue I have is that with HDs present, the VM defaults to booting from HD and I've got to hit F12 to get at the USB stick. virt-manager does not seem to provide an option to boot from usb. Anyone know of a solution?
January 24, 201412 yr A small issue I have is that with HDs present, the VM defaults to booting from HD and I've got to hit F12 to get at the USB stick. virt-manager does not seem to provide an option to boot from usb. Anyone know of a solution? PXE boot unRAID.
January 24, 201412 yr A small issue I have is that with HDs present, the VM defaults to booting from HD and I've got to hit F12 to get at the USB stick. virt-manager does not seem to provide an option to boot from usb. Anyone know of a solution? Create your own .vhd file with the bzroot etc in and boot from that, then the key will be checked only for licensing and configs... Really nice work, this forum is buzzing atm! It's soo good to see people spreading their virtualisation wings in Arch / Manjaro - it makes me a happy badger.
January 24, 201412 yr Author Create your own .vhd file with the bzroot etc in and boot from that, then the key will be checked only for licensing and configs... Really nice work, this forum is buzzing atm! It's soo good to see people spreading their virtualisation wings in Arch / Manjaro - it makes me a happy badger. Was trying to do that but couldn't figure out how to easily make a bootable .vhd on my Mac. Now that I have Windows VMs up and running, I'll just mound a disk image in one of those and do the unRAID voodoo on it. Thanks again.
January 24, 201412 yr Author I've conducted some speed comparison tests of unRAID 6.0 virtualised against my current (albeit underpowered) physical unRAID server. Write operations have more or less doubled, while read has shot up amazingly. I've documented all the figures on my blog; http://mediaserver8.blogspot.ie/2014/01/unraid-60-vm-speed-comparisons.html#more
January 24, 201412 yr That is interesting as I get a flat 44mb/s over my network on v5 and v6. Two different machines over NFS and Cat6, would have expected better read speeds at least from my setup.
January 24, 201412 yr Author I'm pleased for now but will be likely pursuing faster write speeds in future (thinking 6 Gb/s parity drive might help, this is all tested with 3GB/s drives. I don't think I can attribute much of this increase to 64 vs 32 bit - it's more down to significantly better hardware in a much newer machine running the 64bit version. What I am pleased about is that running unRAID in VM is not disappointing in terms of performance at all.
January 24, 201412 yr Author A small issue I have is that with HDs present, the VM defaults to booting from HD and I've got to hit F12 to get at the USB stick. virt-manager does not seem to provide an option to boot from usb. Anyone know of a solution? Create your own .vhd file with the bzroot etc in and boot from that, then the key will be checked only for licensing and configs... That worked like a champ. Made a disk image in virt-manager, attached it to Win 7 VM, formatted and installed unRAID. Attached it to unRAID VM and it booted from that image straight away. Happy days. Many thanks
January 24, 201412 yr Grumpy taught me that one, so glad to have helped. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
January 24, 201412 yr I'm pleased for now but will be likely pursuing faster write speeds in future (thinking 6 Gb/s parity drive might help, this is all tested with 3GB/s drives. Unless you are talking about using SSD's, it won't make a difference. Even the fastest spinners out there don't come close to maxing out a 3Gbit/s interface. They can just barely max out a SATA I interface (1.5Gbit/s).
January 24, 201412 yr Sorry, blatant thread-hijack inbound! Unless you migrate to ZFS, as I have today, you are correct a single drive won't peak much about 140MB/s and that's with a fair wind. This is from my ZFS testing this afternoon, as you may expect I'm pretty happy with this...
January 24, 201412 yr That is all you got? Setup ZIL and L2ARC (tweak both), tweak your NFS or use virtFS (if it's a VM) and it should be even higher.
January 24, 201412 yr Sorry, blatant thread-hijack inbound! Unless you migrate to ZFS, as I have today, you are correct a single drive won't peak much about 140MB/s and that's with a fair wind. This is from my ZFS testing this afternoon, as you may expect I'm pretty happy with this... Definitely impressive, but that's surely a striped array of multiple disks, correct? In the context of my original statement, those individual disks being on 3Gb/s or 6Gb/s interfaces would make absolutely no difference in throughput.
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