Most popular way to virtualize?

[opentoe]

How are users using virtualization with unraid. Are they using VirtualBox, Vmware? Some other kind of virtualization? I know VirtualBox is free and was going to try that. I'm currently running Windows 8.1 and want to get a feel of how this "virtualization" works with unraid so I can apply those features to my new build. I do have a couple spare laptops laying around and I also have an esxi box running a couple VM's now (server 2012 and Linux) but still need to see how unraid benefits as a VM itself. Nothing better to do on a Sunday with tomorrow off! Finally got my current box all XFS now, just copying back which will take another week.

 

 

[garycase]

There are two fundamentally different approaches you can take ...

 

(1)  Run UnRAID in a virtual machine ... probably the best choice for a hypervisor if you're going to do that is ESXi

 

(2)  Run UnRAID v6 natively, and use KVM as your hypervisor for other virtual machines.

 

There are pros and cons of each => perhaps the most often cited one is that with ESXi you can shut down UnRAID without killing all your other VM's.

 

I don't do either -- I run UnRAID natively in its own box; and have a 2nd system for all my virtual machines [Current VMware Workstation under Windows, but planning to move it all to ESXi].    I MAY move one of my UnRAID servers to the ESXi box, but the other 2 will remain standalone systems.

 

[opentoe]

There are two fundamentally different approaches you can take ...

 

(1)  Run UnRAID in a virtual machine ... probably the best choice for a hypervisor if you're going to do that is ESXi

 

(2)  Run UnRAID v6 natively, and use KVM as your hypervisor for other virtual machines.

 

There are pros and cons of each => perhaps the most often cited one is that with ESXi you can shut down UnRAID without killing all your other VM's.

 

I don't do either -- I run UnRAID natively in its own box; and have a 2nd system for all my virtual machines [Current VMware Workstation under Windows, but planning to move it all to ESXi].    I MAY move one of my UnRAID servers to the ESXi box, but the other 2 will remain standalone systems.

 

Thanks for the info. I may run my main unraid server natively also. And still figuring out my new build. Just finding the appropriate hardware takes enough time. Not sure if I want to spend the money on 8TB drives or not.

 

Thanks again-

[luca]

There are two fundamentally different approaches you can take ...

 

(1)  Run UnRAID in a virtual machine ... probably the best choice for a hypervisor if you're going to do that is ESXi

 

(2)  Run UnRAID v6 natively, and use KVM as your hypervisor for other virtual machines.

 

There are pros and cons of each => perhaps the most often cited one is that with ESXi you can shut down UnRAID without killing all your other VM's.

 

I don't do either -- I run UnRAID natively in its own box; and have a 2nd system for all my virtual machines [Current VMware Workstation under Windows, but planning to move it all to ESXi].    I MAY move one of my UnRAID servers to the ESXi box, but the other 2 will remain standalone systems.

 

Much on the same boat. I've run unraid on its own box as a file server, and I run my VMs in WMware Workstation on Win7.

I'm not sure if for my next iteration I should be:

 

1. keeping unraid alone, and simply update the host OS to windows 10

2. move everything to ESXI (scary to have all your eggs in one basket)

3. use unraid for my VMs as well, which begs the question, is there a way to export Vmware machines to KVM?

[garycase]

1. keeping unraid alone, and simply update the host OS to windows 10

2. move everything to ESXI (scary to have all your eggs in one basket)

3. use unraid for my VMs as well, which begs the question, is there a way to export Vmware machines to KVM?

 

Any of those should work just fine.

 

=>  VMware works fine in W10 (already tried it)

=>  ESXi is a VERY stable hypervisor, and VM's from Workstation import directly

=>  UnRAID v6 is moving towards a very nice management utility for KVM VM's

 

I may "play" with #3 a bit; but will likely build a new system with a high-end Xeon to migrate all my VM's to; and am learning towards #2.    In fact, I may also run UnRAID as a VM on the same box.    One notable advantage to having UnRAID run as a separate VM under ESXi instead of using v6 with KVM is you can do maintenance on UnRAID (shut it down; reboot it; etc.) without impacting your other running VMs.  Clearly that can't be done with option #3.

 

[luca]

ESXi is tempting, but I have seen it purple screen a few times, not fun. We have about 40 esxi servers at work, so the chances of something going wrong are bigger, OTOH these were servers specifically chosen to run esxi. There is safety in having different boxes / OSs. I might still try it...

[Ambrotos]

A few years ago when I first started playing with unRAID I ran it as a guest in my ESXi box. I eventually found the need to manually do RDM every time I added/removed a disk to be a bit annoying, so I moved unRAID to its own box. This was around the time that v5 was released, so there was no VM hosting option within unRAID and I kept my ESXi guests running separately. Recently, with the availability of dockers and VMs in unRAID 6 I've moved much of the functionality that was done in VMs to dockers. I like the ability to do map folders directly instead of having to mount CIFS/NFS shares. After the dust settled I was left with two CentOS servers remaining, which I moved to unRAID KVM guests and shutdown the ESXi box. I'm sure the process would be a bit more challenging with Windows-based guests, but it was a breeze with mine; the KVM website has a really straightforward VMWare/KVM migration guide.

 

-A

[opentoe]

Options, so many options!!

 

 

[garycase]

Options, so many options!!

 

Yep, there are a lot of choices 

 

With pros and cons for every one that don't really make any of them "compelling".    Just boils down to personal choice.

 

At one point it seemed "clear" that having everything in a single physical system was "better" for power consumption;  administration; failure protection; etc. => but with modern systems running at such low power levels, working perfectly with S3 (which didn't use to be the case);  and very high-capacity drives allowing high-capacity NAS storage in very small cases; it's not really so clear anymore.