Hi together,

 

I read through the forum to get my questions answered but still I am not feeling 100% satisfied. I am running unRaid since a few month - nearly a year - now and like the way unraid handles my data It works great on my HP Microserver N40L and I got really overwhelmed hearing about XEN integration in 6.x

 

After a few nights and a lot of thinking - I am kind of stuck in how I should proceed - I am using my Microserver with 3x3TB drives mainly for data storage and it serves this data using SMB or using PlexMediaServer to my TV or mobile Clients.

 

More often I have to fire up VMWare Workstation on my private or business laptop to run the one or other VMware image to do some routing virtualization and testing - nothing really CPU or IO intense but still - I have to take the images with me to run them locally. Now - I thought XEN would solve my needs in the future to let those simulations run on the Microserver - but my colleagues and the companies creating those "virtualized labs" are providing vmware images only. Converting the images all the time needs a lot of work, I gonna lose snapshots and sometimes the network configuration has to be redone - so this is not really an option - especially if I have to give the images back to the author - with my changes in it.

 

now I thought about running unraid within ESXi so I can use the spare resources (which would be enough for what I need) to run those simulations beside - but as I read - without VT-D passthrough it is not a good idea at all to run unraid.

 

How can I get a solution for my issue - having pre-created vmware images which the microserver can perfectly serve (tested this with another usb stick having only esxi on it) and unraid which I really like and I don't wanna live without any more.

 

Thanks for suggestions

 

 

 

I could be wrong, but even though the N40L doesn't support PCI passthrough, you can RDM the drives.  Take a look at this thread.

 

I have run ESXi on an N40L, and it can definitely handle multiple VMs, but I've never tried with unRAID.  unRAID on its own is pretty resource light, so as long as your other VMs are equally light, your microserver should be able to keep up.

 

Good luck, and let us all know how it goes!

Thanks for the information - RDM could be the solution thanks

I gonna try this at home and keep you posted.

 

If somebody else has some experience to share I would love to hear about it.

 

Hi,

 

I read through a lot information now about RAW device mapping - is somebody really using it productive or is it only testing?

 

I would like to read something from someone who still uses it productive for their home networks or whatever.

 

Thanks

yes you can do RDM but you will loose the power saving option.

since when you do RDM unRaid does not have control of the disk controller and can not power down the drives as needed.

ah ok, thanks for that

 

is there any option to get the drives spinning down using RDM - I read something about but is it really possible somehow.

because if disk not spinning down - I can use every other RAID system - because thats the huge benefit of unraid - of spinning one disk up only if needed when watching a movie.

I am not sure...

I do think that spin up is not an issue as unraid should just address the one disk it needs.

but spin down on time might be since if unraid can not pass spin down command to controller the disks will spin down based on what ever rules are set on the host system.

so if normal operation for host system is to spin down disk after 10 hours of inactivity for example the array disks might not get spun down at all as there might be some stray ping here and there to keep them up and running. also I am not sure you get the SMART report and temps when using RDM, but I could be wrong.

Or you could stay with unRAID 5 and use the virtualbox plugin to run the vmware images.