johnieutah Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 Hey guys, after 6.5 years of slugging it with an old HP ML115 server and Unraid (free) I just got round to picking up a Gen 8 Microserver for €200. Now I'd like to take advantage of Unraid 6, docker, and all the goodness that comes with it. Before I jump in feet first, I wanted some general advice: I'd be looking at purchasing a 4 device license, I presume a cache drive counts as one device? Docker needs to run on a BTRFS filesystem, can I run that on a drive outside of the protected array (I'm thinking a slimline 120GB SSD) and setup a 3 disk data array? As for data migration, currently I have 1x2TB & 1x750GB data disks. Should I just move these across or is best to start with a completely new array (formatted in XFS?!?) Does Unraid 6 now support USB3? Anything else I need to be wary of? Cheers! Link to comment
itimpi Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 Hey guys, after 6.5 years of slugging it with an old HP ML115 server and Unraid (free) I just got round to picking up a Gen 8 Microserver for €200. Now I'd like to take advantage of Unraid 6, docker, and all the goodness that comes with it. Before I jump in feet first, I wanted some general advice: I'd be looking at purchasing a 4 device license, I presume a cache drive counts as one device? Yes - both cache and parity count towards the license. If you run a cache pool then all drives in the cache pool count. Docker needs to run on a BTRFS filesystem, can I run that on a drive outside of the protected array (I'm thinking a slimline 120GB SSD) and setup a 3 disk data array? Docker no longer needs to run on a BTRFS formatted drive - that was a limitation of one of the early betas (around 6 if I remember correctly). As for data migration, currently I have 1x2TB & 1x750GB data disks. Should I just move these across or is best to start with a completely new array (formatted in XFS?!?) That is really up to you - both options are possible. Does Unraid 6 now support USB3? If you mean as a data drive then the answer is no - only SATA (or IDE) drives are supported. If you mean as a drive external to unRAID then it should work. I expect it depends on which chip set is used for the USB3 (all I know is mine works out-of-the-box). Anything else I need to be wary of? The only thing of significance is to be aware that all v5 plugins (which are 32-bit) are incompatible with v6 (which is 64-bit). Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 3, 2015 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 Thanks for the replies. I'm not interested in the performance advantages of a cache drive, so if I can run Docker images either straight off the array, or better off an SSD not in the array, then that is fine. I don't want to buy a 8 drive license just so that I can have a cache drive as the Microserver will only support 4 drives (plus an SSD just about). The current drives are in Reiser FS. I see now there are options for XFS and BTRFS, how does one choose which one? As for plugins, I am only running Plex and SqueezeboxServer at the moment, both of which I see have Docker plugins. I am also looking at OMV and Xpenology, and would like to see Unraid offer a more feature-rich and easier to use UI/UX. Is there a plugin browser built-in or is there still tinkering under the hood involved? Link to comment
itimpi Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 The current drives are in Reiser FS. I see now there are options for XFS and BTRFS, how does one choose which one? When you add a drive then unRAID will look to see if it recognises the format and if so default to that. If the format is not recognised then the default for data drives is now XFS. At any point you can stop the array; click on the drive in the Main tab to change its format; start the array and select the option to format the drive (which wipes any existing content from it). As for plugins, I am only running Plex and SqueezeboxServer at the moment, both of which I see have Docker plugins. I am also looking at OMV and Xpenology, and would like to see Unraid offer a more feature-rich and easier to use UI/UX. Is there a plugin browser built-in or is there still tinkering under the hood involved? The v6 UI is a 'huge' improvement over v5. It is based on the Dynamix plugin but has been further enhanced. Features such as UPS support, Notifications, SMART monitoring are now all part of the base system. There is a built-in UI for adding dockers and configuring them so that can normally all be done via the UI. There is easy plugin management for adding other plugins such as additional Dynamix ones and VM creation/management (although these will probably end up being built-in) . Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 The GEN 8 micro server can support 4 drives + 1 other SATA device (DVD or SSD where ever you fit it) You can fit 1 low profile PCIe card in the machine for adding 1-4 or up to 8 SAS drives with the right hardware. I posted some of my findings here. My experience with the HP Microserver Gen 8 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=36048.msg335796#msg335796 I don't know if you can have a docker drive outside of the managed array devices and yet still utilize the emhttp management functions. It's been stated that you can have the docker images on an array drive, but not on the user share. Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 3, 2015 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 I don't know if you can have a docker drive outside of the managed array devices and yet still utilize the emhttp management functions. It's been stated that you can have the docker images on an array drive, but not on the user share. Thanks, for the link to the detailed write up. I will look in to this in the future for sure. I just need something small, quiet and reliable. The HP is a really nice bit of kit IMO (save for the slightly tacky hard drive trays). How big are these Docker images on average?!? Isn't it just a wrapper around a program and its associated files? - I presume this has come about as a resolve to the old method of Unraid having to re-install all packages on bootup. Does it matter that docker images live on a data drive? I guess separation would be nice between data & programs... Thanks. Link to comment
itimpi Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 How big are these Docker images on average?!? Isn't it just a wrapper around a program and its associated files? - I presume this has come about as a resolve to the old method of Unraid having to re-install all packages on bootup. Does it matter that docker images live on a data drive? I guess separation would be nice between data & programs... The way unRAID handles docker is to create a docker image file (which is a virtual hard disk) and docker images are installed to that (although their data and configuration remains external to the docker). You can control the space of this image file - I think the default size is 10G. It is difficult to give an absolute size of dockers as it depends on whether they all work off the same default build, and how their deltas are handled, but the 10G seem more than adequate for most people. The size of the image file can easily be increased dynamically, but if you want to reduce it then you have to remove the existing file and create a new one (which means the docker containers to go into it need re-downloading). The big thing that docker brings to unRAID is that installing apps no longer pollutes the core OS and potentially destabilises it. Also apps are isolated from each other which avoids dependency hell. It has also made it much easier to provide a 1-click type install process. Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 Went through the Unraid 6 setup last night. Here are some findings written from the point of view of an extremely basic user ... I'm actually surprised that the "main" Unraid setup screen is still pretty much the same as that which I used 6 years ago... Amazingly it is still fuckupable. Why isn't there some sort of step-by-step wizard that runs on first boot (with an advanced mode for experts). So I have 2 disks in the system (it's all I have left-over). Disks are immediately assigned to their roles (makes sense since the drives are 750 & 160 GB). So far, so good. Both disks are in NTFS format. So now what do I click? Format or calculate parity?!? So I go with parity, which starts chugging away. Then I see a warning that disk 1 is invalid (presumably because it isn't in ReiserFS or XFS?!?), so I choose the format checkbox and click Format. At this point I have no idea if this process is running in parallel to the parity check, the UI doesn't give me any status here. The Main view still does not provide a proper progress display, meaning users have to hit F5 every now and then to see the actual progress of the parity build. Small thing I know, but myMain plugin from Unraid 5 solved this with a simple refresh call every 30 seconds. Not a good UX and this could confuse beginner users Despite the above, overall the UI is much more polished and gives good feedback on the dashboard, but is still lacking compared to rivals IMO (I'm looking at OMV for example) After waiting till parity had finished, the web UI freezes/becomes unresponsive. No way to figure out the status, so I move to the monitor attached to the server and some user shares have been setup apparently, as well as a message about emhttp failing (I guess that is the reason for failed requests to the server). Now it's late so I want to shut the server down. 'Powerdown' doesn't work. Great, so how to shut the server down from the commandl ine? Pressing the power button doesn't do anything. By now I've had enough and do a hard power down. Not a good user experience, anytime people have to get involved from the command line is bad IMO. So far I have mixed feelings, I thought part of Unraid 6 was to make things more robust and user friendly... Tonight I will have a play around with Docker. Some thoughts on the Gen 8: Lovely hardware, it's cute! Nice and quiet - once it's finished booting It takes an age to boot, much slower than my ML115. I swear it boots twice or something, initialising all this stuff, iLO etc... I'm not interested in any of that (yet). Actually this has quite an affect for me, I just start the server as and when I need it (music and film server predominately) Link to comment
itimpi Posted March 4, 2015 Share Posted March 4, 2015 I'm actually surprised that the "main" Unraid setup screen is still pretty much the same as that which I used 6 years ago... Amazingly it is still fuckupable. Why isn't there some sort of step-by-step wizard that runs on first boot (with an advanced mode for experts). So I have 2 disks in the system (it's all I have left-over). Disks are immediately assigned to their roles (makes sense since the drives are 750 & 160 GB). So far, so good. Both disks are in NTFS format. So now what do I click? Format or calculate parity?!? So I go with parity, which starts chugging away. Then I see a warning that disk 1 is invalid (presumably because it isn't in ReiserFS or XFS?!?), so I choose the format checkbox and click Format. At this point I have no idea if this process is running in parallel to the parity check, the UI doesn't give me any status here. Note that the new UI is relatively new - it was only added a few beta releases ago and is still being tuned and bugs eliminated. I agree that you should not be given options that do not apply. Mentioning them here is worthwhile as this is something that can be tidied up. The UI SHOULD be giving you status. However it appears that on some browsers the updates do not happen as expected. I assume that this is being looked into. The Main view still does not provide a proper progress display, meaning users have to hit F5 every now and then to see the actual progress of the parity build. Small thing I know, but myMain plugin from Unraid 5 solved this with a simple refresh call every 30 seconds. Not a good UX and this could confuse beginner users This is a bug - the default is realtime updates. These do not seem to be working for everyone. You should not need to use F5 unless you disable automatic updates. Having said that I find that for me that when using the chrome browser and setting the update frequency to 30 seconds I can see the status line counting down to the next update, but when it gets there it is not happening. I think this is due to some quirk in chrome as with IE it seems to work as expected. Despite the above, overall the UI is much more polished and gives good feedback on the dashboard, but is still lacking compared to rivals IMO (I'm looking at OMV for example) I am sure suggestions for enhancements going forward will be welcomed. having said that I think the current thrust is to get the current interface stable enough so that the 6.0 release can be made and enhancements done in subsequent releases. After waiting till parity had finished, the web UI freezes/becomes unresponsive. No way to figure out the status, so I move to the monitor attached to the server and some user shares have been setup apparently, as well as a message about emhttp failing (I guess that is the reason for failed requests to the server). Now it's late so I want to shut the server down. 'Powerdown' doesn't work. Great, so how to shut the server down from the commandl ine? Pressing the power button doesn't do anything. By now I've had enough and do a hard power down. Not a good user experience, anytime people have to get involved from the command line is bad IMO. The UI should not become non-responsive. Some people are reporting it happens to them and the thrust is on working out why so this can be resolved. The fact that powerdown does not seem to work correctly if the UI becomes unresponsive definitely needs looking at. The third party variant that was available as a plugin on v5 seemed to be able to handle this in a reasonably tidy way. So far I have mixed feelings, I thought part of Unraid 6 was to make things more robust and user friendly... Tonight I will have a play around with Docker. We are still lacking some good documentation on getting a new user started with docker on unRAID. The information is scattered around the forum. Apparently a proper User Guide is being worked on but I have no idea of its current status. However most users seem to be able to get docker up and running with minimal guidance. I think it is moving in that direction quite nicely now. However there is definitely further to go Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 Running yet another parity check since the system wasn't shut down cleanly. Couple of questions... Is the "powerdown" script now built in to Unraid, and if not, how should I be shutting it down safely? Is there some sort of hardware hook to allow me to just hit power button? Thanks Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 To answer my own question, the powerdown plugin is still required. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31735.0 Nice and easy to install, that's what I like to see. Am I right in thinking that plugins still need to be re-installed on reboot? Link to comment
trurl Posted March 4, 2015 Share Posted March 4, 2015 ...Am I right in thinking that plugins still need to be re-installed on reboot? Don't know where you got that idea. Plugins re-install themselves on reboot provided you have installed them correctly to begin with. Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 ...Am I right in thinking that plugins still need to be re-installed on reboot? Don't know where you got that idea. Plugins re-install themselves on reboot provided you have installed them correctly to begin with. Well sure, they are automatically reinstalled, but reinstalled nonetheless... Just trying to work out when something would be installed via docker and when as a plugin. Link to comment
trurl Posted March 4, 2015 Share Posted March 4, 2015 Plugins and dockers typically don't re-download on bootup because the downloads are already on persistent storage. Whether they re-install or not may just be a matter of semantics. At some point, they do get loaded into memory, including some of the RAMfs folders. It's not usually an issue since booting is not frequent, and most of the "working storage" such as databases are also persistent. Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 I'm not having much here. I'm trying to set Docker up, following this guide: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=37732.0 And whoops, there goes the connection to the server again. Is this a general problem with Unraid 6 betas?? Can still browse to the disks over SAMBA, only the web view is down... happens every now and then on my Unraid 5 build, but I would say on 6 it drops consistently. Most annoying Link to comment
itimpi Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 What browser are you using? I find that if I use IE then I can lose the GUI. If I use Chrome then it appears to be rock-solid. This is on Windows 8.1 as a base. I also have no trouble accessing the GUI from my iPad using a variety if different browsers. Why the different browsers should give different results I have no idea. Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 Tried both IE11 & Firefox on Windows 8.1. It just hangs trying to connect. Will try again later, want to try out a few docker configurations. Cheers. Link to comment
trurl Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 I'm not having much here. I'm trying to set Docker up, following this guide: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=37732.0 And whoops, there goes the connection to the server again. Is this a general problem with Unraid 6 betas?? Can still browse to the disks over SAMBA, only the web view is down... happens every now and then on my Unraid 5 build, but I would say on 6 it drops consistently. Most annoying Doesn't happen to me. What is the screenshot supposed to tell us? Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 Screenshot was mistake, ignore it. Another thing I have noticed - and maybe this needs to go in to it's own thread - is that each time I boot in to Unraid, the array isn't started. I am now using the powerdown script so the system should be in a clean state upon booting. Any ideas guys? Link to comment
trurl Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 Screenshot was mistake, ignore it. Another thing I have noticed - and maybe this needs to go in to it's own thread - is that each time I boot in to Unraid, the array isn't started. I am now using the powerdown script so the system should be in a clean state upon booting. Any ideas guys? Settings - Disk Settings - Enable auto start: Yes Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 Great thanks mate. Just got Logitech Media Server up and running... I'm really liking this docker integration. Works a treat Link to comment
johnieutah Posted March 13, 2015 Author Share Posted March 13, 2015 Couple more questions: Does Unraid 6 support S3 hibernate/sleep? If so this would help with the slow boot times... USB3 support. I tried out copying some files from a Sandisk USB3 flash drive and the write speeds were pretty crap (to put it bluntly). The hard drive I am writing to is not the best to be honest, but I was expecting USB3 to still be quicker than USB2. I'm guessing this is a combination of parity calculations/poor hard drive or is USB3 support in Unix still not fully baked? Thanks again guys. Link to comment
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