Newbie Question about ESXI install.

[SteelCityColt]

I'm looking at rolling out my virgin unRAID install as a VM on my HP Microserver and I'm still a little confused as how I should best do this. Read the sticky and it seems the option for install is either vmdk (dependent on others to update) or to go via plop. From the reading of things it looks like I'm better off going down the plop route but I'm a little confused about the hardware pass through side of things. Server currently has a SSD and a 3TB NAS drive (hey we've all got to start somewhere!) and I wanted to use the SSD for all things VM while leaving the NAS drive purely for unRAID ti ac. Issue is the the G1610 doesn't have VT-D. Am I in trouble?

 

 

[kaiguy]

It's been so long since I've configured ESXi, that I don't even know if my method is ideal anymore.  This is from memory:

 

You will the SSD as a datastore under ESXi and pass through the "NAS" drive to the unRAID VM via raw device mapping.  The Atlas build thread should give you all you need.

 

However, considering unRAID's virtualization capabilities, why do you want to run it under ESXi on your Microserver?  Why not just run unRAID baremetal, and use either Dockers or KVM machines if you need them?  You could then assign your SSD as an unRAID cache drive and have it do double duty...

[SteelCityColt]

This is exactly what I ended up doing, after working out that VT-D or lack of was going to make ESXi even more of a pain I just went with unRAID bare metal. Not looked back since. Sure it's not as pretty or feature rich as ESXi but for what I need it's more than enough. Got a pfSense VM up and running and while the network bridging isn't as pretty in the console it's working wonderfully well.

 

Big thumbs up for unRAID so far.