I currently have a sweet 17 TB unRAID setup running 5.05. I'm not a computer guy by training but have sort of picked up nuggets of helpful information along the way.

 

Right now, while unRAID is rock solid, I am using a lot of plugins -- Sab, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, APCUPSd, Crashplan, PLEX -- and often, these plugins 'break' the stability of unRAID causing the server to crash. Not always, but sometimes.

 

I've thought for a long time about whether I could test the stability by moving these plugins to a different environment, and I got myself a Dell PowerEdge 2950 off Craigslist, ran Ubuntu 14.04 server, and disabled all these plugins on unraid and ran them on the Ubuntu server with the unraid shares mounted on bootup via FSTAB. The thing works beautifully.

 

Unfortunately, when I got this month's electricity bill, I realized that while the Dell server was elegant (but loud), it is an extremely power-hungry machine. I checked consumption with kill-a-watt and I was getting 350 W power use at idle on the Poweredge server alone!

 

So I've been thinking about one of two options:

 

1. Use a Raspberry Pi to do exactly what I've been doing with the Poweredge server (I probably can't run PLEX but should be able to run the rest of the web services), with minimal power consumption.

 

2. Virtualize unraid -- I should say that I am COMPLETELY new to virtualization. Beyond running different VMs on a Virtualbox I have no experience over setting up Xenserver, KVM vs ESXi -- and I am unable to find a comprehensive tutorial explaining how to set up unraid in this on the forum (I wish someone would write one out from beginning), obviously any such set up should have pass-through capability.

 

Can someone here who is much more experienced suggest whether this makes any sense? Or whether there are other solutions to this that I may not have thought through? Really appreciate any input.

I think you're on the right track moving the plugins to a dedicated environment - but instead of a physical box (dell poweredge, or PI), perhaps a virtual machine, hosted on the unraid box itself?

 

Ive not done it myself, but plan on it once Ive moved to v6 (with its built in xen / kvm support), just to compartmentalise the potentially hazardous applications away from the core unraid functions

I think you're on the right track moving the plugins to a dedicated environment - but instead of a physical box (dell poweredge, or PI), perhaps a virtual machine, hosted on the unraid box itself?

 

Ive not done it myself, but plan on it once Ive moved to v6 (with its built in xen / kvm support), just to compartmentalise the potentially hazardous applications away from the core unraid functions

 

You have a very powerful CPU in your server which is going to be very underutilized doing unRaid stuff. Virtualization and/or dockerization is something that will help you leverage that investment and serve the needs to run apps like you mention. I am not sure that something like raspberry pi is going to give you the horsepower to run plex especially while doing high volume i/o, unraring, par2 checking, and other tasks.

 

But the key to successfully using virtualization is fast i/o from the VM to your cache and array disks. Xen sees your unRaid array as a separate machine and requires accessing via network protocols like Samba and NFS. These are not nearly as fast as accessing local disks. You can create a simulated disk but it looks like a large single file to unRaid and loses its value for maintaining media shared across your network. KVM offers a way to pass through a physical drive offering fast speeds and from a virtualization perspective in unRaid seems the best choice. The very popular archVM from IronicBlasrer is available as both a Xen (the original which I am currently using) and KVM.

 

A second option is using docker containers. Similar in many ways to VM technology, it is not VM. It does provide isolation that should not affect stability of your unRaid system. It provides native access to the array which is a huge positive. But having a separate container for each app seems (to me at least) a management headache. And it is unclear how tied we become to the container author for updates. There is significant work in the community to create docker containers to run various apps.

 

The other option that a small number of unRaid users have successfully set up is setting up ESX/ESXi. It installs on the bare metal and allows virtualization similar to Xen and KVM. But ESX is from VMware - arguably the biggest and best supported virtual platform. VMware images can even be copied from a Windows desktop version to ESX - a potentially very nice feature for anyone that has an investment in VMware already. You run unRaid as an.ESX VM.and, it won't even know it. I am not clear how drives are accessed at high speed bit I do believe users have overcome sny performance issue with features of ESX.

 

So the options as I see them are KVM, Docker, and ESX. I am kind of watching to see a clear winner emerge before investing lot of effort in any direction. If you have a workable solution for the next few months I.might suggest sitting tight and following the forum developments.

 

As a side note, some add-ons should remain in unRaid itself including the UPS support, and array management (e.g., unmenu/myMain, Dynamix, etc.)..I.don't think these will ever move out of the unRaid instance.

 

Hope this helps!