There seems to be a good bit of talk about VMWare ON unRaid but i'm looking to go the other way....

 

I already have a big bad server running Vista host and a Windows Server 2003 VM and would like to add an unRaid VM.

 

I want to run unRaid in a VM and give unRaid direct disk access to physical disks.  This would allow me to put the unraid data disks onto dedicated hardware and run off usb key like most people do should the need arises.

 

I had no trouble making a 2GB virtual disk in a small Virtual machine, booting unRaid and logging into the console but I couldn't get the virtual network adapter working. 

I'm hardly a 'nix guru and didn't try very hard to make it happen.  Does anybody know how and if unraid can support the VMWare virtual network adapter.

 

--dimes

Does anybody know how and if unraid can support the VMWare virtual network adapter.

 

You should probably start with this thread:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1215.msg8171#msg8171

 

You'll probably have two options getting networking working.  Hopefully, manually changing the vmx file to specify "e1000" as the network adapter as mentioned in the post above will work.  If not, you should be able to build a custom unRAID kernel to add the driver for the pcnet32 virtual NIC that VMware defaults to.

 

Also, as mentioned in the post, you might be limited in the number of drives you can use virtually.

Since unRAID is largely I/O bound, and I/O with VMware typically goes through a virtualization layer, I'd be mainly concerned about getting the necessary I/O performance.

I second that.

 

I second that.

 

Me too.  I'd rather put the vmserver on the Linux box, and have a "virtual" MS-Windows machine or two for other needed defined. 

 

Joe L.

 

 

yeah performance is going to be rough, but this is a good idea to test out functionality of the new features.  just throw a bunch of small virtual disks at it and try NFS settings etc...