Hi together,

 

before I start asking my question I wanted to mention that I love how Unraid as a Raid is working - it is actually perfect for me as a home user but ...

 

Unraid as a HomeServer OS is not what I really want. I hate the plugin management and the quality how the plugins are created. I really be annoyed about the way to install new software from the slack repo and so on ...

Also I cannot afford having Unraid running as an Storage only and have a second server for plex, crashplan, www etc etc which is using unraid as a datastore.

 

Therefor - my question - is there any raid solution like unraid which allows storing complete files per disk and create a parity. Also if I need data - only one disk is spinning up instead of the whole raid?

I am fine if I have to pay for it - but I would prefer to have a linux running on my server.

Or is it possible to have UnRaid integrated into a Debian or CentOS installation without being a NASA experienced system administrator?

 

Also the 6.x version with virtualization is not really an option for me - it is complete overhead for what I need and the easy management of VMs - is not considered in my opinion in 6.x

 

I also thought about running Unraid as a VM - but my hardware is not supporting pass-through - which makes it risky for data storing on my harddisk using RDM. As it seems not really much experience from the community about it - which makes it now an optione at this point.

 

Thanks for any advice

You should look more closely at v6 => that comes the closest to what you're asking for, although I agree the VM management isn't (yet) as simple as I'd like to see.

 

If you want a single server with RAID, you can do that with any PC you want by simply adding a good RAID card and building a RAID-5 or RAID-6 array to provide fault-tolerance (or dual drive tolerance with RAID-6).    Most of the better cards support spindown, so the array drives will spin down ... but you won't get the UnRAID feature of only one drive spinning up, as both RAID-5 and RAID-6 will spin up all drives for you to access the array.

 

If you're concerned about power, note that a low-power Atom-based UnRAID system can idle below 20 watts, and only use 25 watts or so when accessing a single drive.    Using one of these as a storage-only NAS and running another box dedicated to your applications is likely to use LESS power than many higher-power builds running virtual machines on v6.

 

although I am not 100% agree with you on virtualization bit, even though you are right about unraids VM management issues.

 

as for everything else, I have a suggestion that might work for you even though it is again not 100% thing.

 

you see there is no solution that gives you unraid features and have no faults.

unraid is somewhat unique in the way it does things.

like no-stripe raid5 or single disk spin-up on data access lamp into a single package.

there are similar solutions out there.

like SnapRaid for example, it gives you no-strip raid 5/6 and single disk spin up

but no real time protection. you need to make timed snapshots either manually or via cron job.

 

I am currently building a system using OpenSuse + Xen with a BTRFS data shares.

much like you I have a server with not IOMMU compatible hardware so can not run unraid in VM. and v6 is just not user friendly enough for me to use as I do need a good VM management for what I want to do. I have an unraid server running for my media shares but I think it will be relegated to backup server once my main file/vm machine is up and running.

 

using BTRFS gives me good fault tolerant FS with features of RAID and LVM backed in. it is  a CoW FS much like ZFS but a lot more flexible and not as resource hungry.

 

the only thing I am loosing is no-stripe raid nad single disk spin-up but I can live with it.

 

unRAID is a somewhat unique offering, appealing to the media enthusiast and providing very economical redundancy preserving data access on each individual volume. Other products in this space tend to not have real-time protection. Instead there is some periodic batch that updates the redundant data. This is not what I want, but you could explore FlexRaid and other such options if this works for you.

 

You've clearly had some problems with plugins in 5.0.5. This is a rare complaint. Most users find what they are after, get it installed (which can be a little painful as they work through issues), and use them painless going forward. Your complaints about the plugins and quality are not specific. I do think there are quality plugins available here.

 

But I think unRAID 6 sounds like what you want. I would recommend installing unRAID and a single "companion" VM. The unRAID in dom0 would run the array, and the companion OS would contain a full Linux version in a persistent install, be it Debian or CentOS or something else. You'd be on one box, unRAID would be in its own world, and you'd not have to mess with unRAID specific plugins to run the Linux software you enjoy.

 

That would be my suggestion.

flexraid or snapraid. Both do similar things with parity protection.

 

flexraid offers more around 'being a server' than snapraid does. Both alternatives worth looking at if you're looking for non-striped parity.

Running unRAID as DOM0 is the default configuration and requires no special hardware. Guest VMs can run without special hardware if the guests do not require direct hardware access. Plex, torrent, usenet, sab, dlna, etc., do not require direct hardware access and will run in a guest VM on a system with no special hardware. VMs. for XBMC, Windows, a second unRAID instance, etc., do require some level of direct hardware access and there are at least 2 hardware varieties that allow varying levels of direct hardware access for VMs.

 

Mosts users can run stock unRAID in DOM0 and put add-ons in 1 or more VMs without regard to hardware.

Hi together,

 

thanks for all your feedback - amazing

 

@garycase & dgaschk

I am following v6 since the start and looked forward to it before it ever started - read articles and also read forum posts. But I do have two problems with Xen

One is - that in my company we all using VMWare - this lead to a lot of VMWare test environments and already installed VMWare Images during the years. Privat and Business Ones - especially as a network guy I have to test a lot of thing - and most of the labs I get are VMWare images. The do not need a lot of resources but most of the time there a some specialties included which makes converting to Xen always little harder. Also if you want to give the images back with adjustments - converting Xen to VMWare is not so easy.

The other thing - which bothers me more is the way Unraid 6 implements Xen - I mean there was a great (perhaps not perfect) management tool open sourced by by Citrix to manage Xen - I tested it and as a home user it is perfekt - it is everything I need and more - but as far as I understood it cannot be used with Unraid 6 - which I don't get. Fiddling around with text files and CLI is ok - as long as there is no better solution - in this case - not the way I want to support.

 

About hardware RAID - that would be an option - but in my HP Microserver NL40 there is not enough space to put a RAID card in there - if there would - I could use one with passthrough and ESXi (for example) so I wouldn't be here.

 

Also the option having a second PC standing and running is not an option - not mainly because power consumption - my Microserver is very friendly in this area - it is more a personal ideology not having xx numbers of PCs standing around where the resources are not used properly.

 

@vl1969 & boof

I gonna look at SnapRaid and how it handles things - perhaps that could be an option - the data on my DataStore is not changing that often - so a scheduled Parity generation could be a possibility.

 

By the way - I read about BTRFS - which sound good. Before I came to Unraid I thought about ZFS and was not using it mainly of the memory usage and the complicated way to handle failed disks and put/remove extra disks into/from the array.

Btrfs seems to overcome those issues - but what I am interested in - do you build the system with RAID1, RADI10 or do you use the experimental implementation of RAID5/6? I could live with the "all" disks spin-up part - at the end - if RAID management is as easy as on Unraid and described in BTRFS but what I cannot live with is complicates RAID changes and the the system cannot handle different disk sizes within a raid.

 

Because you can give me a follow up

 

@bjp999

Hmm - plugin rare complaint ? If I got through the forum there a a few articles and users having problems - some problems getting solved - a lot of problems do get never answered.

 

As an example there are a lot of thread were unraid is not reachable any more after some plugins installed - solution get rid of plugins and run a clean system and start over again putting the plugins in to find the problem. Which leads to the conclusion one plugin can break it all and finding the problem is done by try and error. I had these issues now twice.

 

Another thing is the way plugins get installed - they are not permanent - so installing at boot up and hopefully the configuration stays the same than before the shut down.

Example is my CrashPlan plugin - it never worked as expected. Installation at boot time crashed emhttp because of the JAVA installation and I always lost the configuration. It is easy to restore but as long as you do not connect to CrashPlan via GUI the system is not working. Which was also only possible after killing install process and do a manual install after deleting all configs before. Having this issue now for more than a year ... and asked for help and got ignrored.

 

Also other plugins were able to kill emhttp which I cannot restart manually so I have to reboot - which by the way always leads to a Parity Check - why? I have to install a separate bundle of poweroff scripts so unraid handles its own reboot properly - that is not good and I can go on.

 

I really like Unraid - the raid option is incredible - but everything around seems like patchworking - and I don't want to pay for patchworks but would have had to based on the number of disks I want to use with unraid which is not fixing the patchwork stuff..

 

@all

Who mentioned running Unraid 6 with Xen and having Plex and Crashplan within a VMWare - this is an option. You are right! I gonna consider this but not as long as the Beta4 having some strange and unverified problems and also as long as I have to handle my VMs with textfiles if there are nicer solutions out there (also for Xen) this is something I look at but not consider at the moment.

 

Thanks for your help

I spent a few hours yesterday to recreate my server using Ubuntu 14.04 server edition.

 

thanks to the way unRAID is storing data it was very easy - nearly all services are up and running and the performance seems to be better than before.

 

the only thing I am missing is the web based overview what that status of my disk is - like smart, temp, idle, active etc?

has somebody an idea what to use ?

 

thanks

are you saying you integrated unRaid into Ubuntu ?!

do tell what the setup you manage to create.

no what I did was setting up ubuntu to work nearly like unraid.

 

• mounting the existing reiserfs disk and merge them using mhddfs - which was zero work at all. (if I have time I start converting - perhaps.
  
• installed plex - using the unRaid folder structure I hadn't to change anything after copy my old plex config back
  
• installed crashplan - works like a charm also after reboot
  
• using snapraid for my parity disk - took the old unRaid disk formated it to ext4 and done - parity is created once a day
  
• hdparm & hd-idle solved the spindown for me
  
• installing vmware workstation without GUI let me now connect to it using another PC to move VMwares there
  

 

now my system works nearly like unRAID but with more flexibility, added another HDD to mhddfs and snapraid without any issue. what I am missing now is a "monitoring" interface to see what the disks are doing, if they are idle and so on.

 

Then I am set - and have replaced my unRAID with an ubuntu.

funny, I am attempting similar thing with OpenSuse and BTRFS.

my hardware does not support IOMMU so could not run unraid in VM as I originally intended. v6 is too raw for me at the moment. I would like better and GUI VM management. so am trying to get the best I can.

 

what I have with BTRFS:

1. a full RAID/LVM capability built into a File System.

2. a CoW  and bitrot protection in addition to #1 like ZFS but better implemented IMHO

3. an automated snapshot of changes in addition to parity

 

what I don't have :

1. unRaids data distribution. the BTRFS raid is similar to normal raid as in it's stripes the data amongst the disks. it does it better than regular raid and LVM but still.

2. no monitoring of setup status and disk status at this time.

however there are some tools , or so I have heard, that could be setup to provide the SMART data and system status as needed. still researching this.

3. it's still a relatively new FS and some things are still in beta status even at this time. mostly the utilities to work with the FS. the FS core is considered stable, at least by opensuse community. the next major release(13.2) will have it as default option. but even 13.1 let you choose it as such and installs and runs from it very well.

 

check out the  "smartmontools "  and  "GSmartControl " for monitoring.

 

BTRFS is an option only as soon as RAID5 is out of experimental - the rest is great on BTRFS.

Also using mhddfs I can let single disks to spin down and only use the disks I need for my home server - and files are spread not junks/blocks.

 

gsmartcontrol is not an option - I do not have a GUI installed on the system so far and want to keep it that way

so if you find a web based tool for monitoring the hardware properly and easily - let me know

 

thanks

 

don't remember but isn't webmin have the SMART utility

 

also phpsysinfo  may be of use.

 

as for RAID 5 with BTRFS, I am currently setting up all as RAID 1(have enough drive space for all my data now) and will convert all to RAID 5or6 when it is stable.

the whole beauty of BTRFS is that you can change your setup on the fly, with running system and no restart.

 

when I started to play with this server setup  I converted the BTRFS system drive from single disk RAID0 to double disk RAID 1 while system was running with no perceivable slowdown. I was surfing web and checking system stats at the same time.  :-) try to do this with ZFS :-P