Just a random question.  Not sure if this has been discussed, but I was wondering if unRAID own the USB stick outright or can it be partitioned and used for running a vm too?

 

unRAID uses like no space, so if we had a 16GB USB, can it be partitioned, 4GB for unraid and 12GB for XEN vms?  I guess because currently we must use the cache drive the answer is no, but if unRAID adds support for LVMs and such, would this not free us from having to rely on the cache drive and instead allow us to use real directives like /dev/vg-xxx/lg-xxx?

not a good idea, although I'll bet it is possible.

running VMs do a lot of disk access and will shorten the live of your Flash Drive

now if you are using the basic free setup  it is not a big issue as you would need to simply have a resent backup of the drive that you could put on new flash drive and be done.

but if you use paid setup then your license is tide to the USB GUID and if it go you have to jump through hoops of contacting Tom and requesting license move to new USB drive etc. hence why people use cache drives for that.

 

 

just to add some weight to this.

 

it is a TERRIBLE idea. JUST DONT DO IT.

 

haha, OK, thanks guys.  Makes sense.

just to add some weight to this.

 

it is a TERRIBLE idea. JUST DONT DO IT.

 

+99

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

 

........ I guess because currently we must use the cache drive the answer is no......

 

What about SNAP plugin? I haven't used it but I see it's available for v6 and maintained by dlandon who also has been maintaining powerdown. Hmmm.......

I installed SNAP on my XEN test system, moved the ArchVM image over to and and booted it up. Very interesting! This ArchVM image is one I don't use at the moment and I wanted to get it off the cache drive.

 

I'm a late-comer to the whole SNAP plug-in thing and it look a little while to understand how it works. Once the plug-in is installed it will show up in unRAID's webGUI "Settings" section. The drive I used had some existing partitions, ext4, lvm and it turned out SNAP really only support reiserfs, ntfs and fat. So, I wound up formatting outside of unRAID.

 

SNAP is oriented towards hot-plugging USB drives (I think), but SATA drives can be used. Once SNAP is installed the drive will show up on the main webGUI page with a blue ball, but there's not much you can do with it. unMENU probably has better support for SNAP.

 

There's some command line set-up that needs to be done to add a drive to the snap.list file. You have to add a line to your "go" file to mount and share the drive at boot. I think you'll have to dig up the original SNAP thread (or run snap.sh --help) to see it's options.

 

All-in-all SNAP seems like a good add-on! Dlandon has done a good job of keeping it alive!!

That does sound very interesting. If Tom can find the time to integrate that sort of thing into the webgui proper, then it would make things very interesting indeed. The cache drive solution works OK, heck even running from /mnt/disk1 is ok, but I think many would prefer being able to mount a separate, say, SSD independent of the array so it keeps running even if the array is down. Is that right? Is that how SNAP works?

I have an SSD mounted outside my array, formatted ext4, that I use for my plugin apps.

My plan was to install my VM datastores to it in the future when I get that far.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=30496.0

 

 

It's nice to see there are some options on where VM's can live! I'm still learning about SNAP, but I did take the array offline and my SNAP-mounted VM is still running; I'm able to connect to the share that SNAP created and connect to the VM's web pages.

What have you seen from the performance stance?

What have you seen from the performance stance?

Thanks for the question! I my case it's really too early to tell. This is just a test set up and the SNAP-mounted VM is a "toe in the water." I can move my more "production" oriented VM to it for a while to see.

 

But, the SNAP drive is a recycled laptop drive (spinner); my unRAID cache drive is a SSD. So it's really apples and oranges at this point.

What have you seen from the performance stance?

Thanks for the question! I my case it's really too early to tell. This is just a test set up and the SNAP-mounted VM is a "toe in the water." I can move my more "production" oriented VM to it for a while to see.

 

But, the SNAP drive is a recycled laptop drive (spinner); my unRAID cache drive is a SSD. So it's really apples and oranges at this point.

 

SNAP only manages the mounting/unmounting of the drive.  A SNAP mounted drive will run at Linux native speeds after being mounted.  SNAP does not interfere with the drive after being mounted.

 

SNAP only mounts the first partition found on the drive and will mount reiserfs, vfat, msdos, ext2, ext3, and ntfs.  ntfs can only be written with the ntfs3g driver loaded.

That's good to now, thanks for the information. May be an option depending on what one does with the VM, but USB 3.0 would be a benefit I would think. Maybe when Thunderbolt becomes a little more common that my be a great option for this.

I am working on a new feature for Powerdown that will make starting and stopping VMs a lot easier and smoother.  Basically you set up some scripts to start and stop your VMs and Powerdown will run them at certain unRAID events.

 

For example a start script would be:

/boot/config/plugins/snap/snap.sh -m ShareName ---> to mount your drive

xl create VmName

 

This script will be picked up by Powerdown and run whenever the unRAID array event 'started' occurs.

 

Another script could be created to stop your VM:

xl shutdown -a -w

 

This script would be run whenever unRAID is about to unmount the drives.

 

This is slick because your VM will be stopped whenever the 'stop' button is clicked on the webgui and restarted whenever the 'start' button is clicked on the webgui.

 

This will make it a lot easier to manage VMs.

I am working on a new feature for Powerdown that will make starting and stopping VMs a lot easier and smoother.  Basically you set up some scripts to start and stop your VMs and Powerdown will run them at certain unRAID events............This will make it a lot easier to manage VMs.

 

This sounds like a great idea! Right now I'm starting/stopping my VM by hand....just lazy I guess.

 

Edit: I see now SNAP will unmount a drive if array is stopped. I guess I didn't wait long enough to see it earlier.