I have been an advocate of esxi in combination with unraid for some time.. 

 

I took the plunge and started testing with Docker and KVM, the results have been amazing.. I have migrated al of my media stuff (sick, couch, transmission, sabnzbd, plex) to the unraid box, they perform great, impact on resources is minimal and upgrading the tools (within Docker) is now easier then ever. I had to set up a KVM ubuntu machine for spotweb but even that was as easy as with esxi.

 

I just gave my esxi box a final shutdown... Guess I can now start using that as a backup server

Nice to know => that speaks very well for the stability of the KVM hypervisor.

 

I have just removed my ssd's from the esxi system to put them into the unraid box for the cache pool :-)

And done...

 

Just added 2 * 250gig Samsung SSD to my system, now running a 3 * 250 gig btrfs cache pool with 378gig in total..

 

Easy process..

I am wanting to do this too, but never got to it. I have to learn new tricks, which is the fun, but also hard part for me.

 

Where can I find a "KVM in Unraid V6 for dummies" guide that explains everything from the early first setup till a full fledged setup running several VMs like Windows, Linux, Mac OS and other stuff.

I migrated everything over from Esxi this summer and really liking it. I ran into two problems though.

 

The first thing was my virtual pfsense that ran great for years in my Esxi setup but using 2x network bridges was not the best experience in unraid. Instead of passing through the second nic I opted for a physical pfsense box which I made from a really small workstation.

 

The second problem for me was btrfs. After a couple of days the performance of my 3x ssd cache pool went down. Copying large files meant a load over 50 and all the vms became unusable. I solved that by adding zfs support on unraid and things have been smooth and stable since then. I use the 3x ssds in raid-z1 with compression for my vms and 1x ssd with xfs for a cache drive.

 

I like having everything inside unraid and I sleep better not virtualizing my main storage server anymore.

 

It was really easy moving the vms over. But I recommend having good backups and be aware that your drive names will be renamed from /dev/sdx to /dev/vdx so you might need to update grub. Then remove open-vm-tools

 

The second problem for me was btrfs. After a couple of days the performance of my 3x ssd cache pool went down. Copying large files meant a load over 50 and all the vms became unusable. I solved that by adding zfs support on unraid and things have been smooth and stable since then. I use the 3x ssds in raid-z1 with compression for my vms and 1x ssd with xfs for a cache drive.

 

 

Any links referencing this??  I plan to move most of my vms soon and would like to avoid any issues if i can.

 

The second problem for me was btrfs. After a couple of days the performance of my 3x ssd cache pool went down. Copying large files meant a load over 50 and all the vms became unusable. I solved that by adding zfs support on unraid and things have been smooth and stable since then. I use the 3x ssds in raid-z1 with compression for my vms and 1x ssd with xfs for a cache drive.

 

 

Any links referencing this??  I plan to move most of my vms soon and would like to avoid any issues if i can.

 

Just search the forum. Many of us have switched from btrfs cashe drives to xfs because of slowdown issues.

Xfs has been solid for me for a cache drive, but if you want to use more than one drive for vms/ docker you can play with the zfs plugin.

Xfs has been solid for me for a cache drive, but if you want to use more than one drive for vms/ docker you can play with the zfs plugin.

 

I just did a hardware raid1

Or that I just love automatic snapshots. Gives me some insurance when (not if) I mess up a vm with tinkering. Really easy to rollback

Nice to know KVM supports snapshots => that's a feature in VMware that I'd really hate to lose.

 

I use zfs snapshots. But Kvm supports snapshots with qcow images if I remember correctly.