zipeldiablo Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Hello, i'm the new guy around, developper from france i join the world of virtualization after reading the excellent vfio blogpost. I came here because i have a lot of questions, articles keep contradict themselves and i'm kinda lost atm. My main question here is about unraid, xen and kvm. I truly do not understand what unraid is, i'm sorry if people think the "what is unraid" page is clear but for me it isn't, so, what is it clearly? At first i thought this was a virtualization server but it appears i was wrong, the only thing i got is that unraid is for dealing with datas. Also since it appears i can create software like raid with unraid, does it support two disks parity? Speaking of xen, it is suppose to be a bare metal hypervisor aka i can install it with no os, so i don't understand why i can install xen with fedora centos etc... Is this process switching the host system to a dom0 system, putting the os on top of xen and not the other way around? Because if not i don't understand why people would install xen of top of an os when you can just use kvm to run your vms. What i want to do, what i did, using kvm and fedora, was to create myself a windows 10 gaming virtual machine. The problem i have here is that if i want to create a raid, to be able to read datas from both fedora and my windows vm i will need either create a nas like raid inside of my machine, meaning i will create the raid on fedora and put it on my local network (and i believe that is what unraid is for?) or create a raid using hardware (like a pci raid card) and pass it to my vm when i start it. The later solution including a 200dollars card, i would prefer to use the first solution. The second problem is that most of the time i do not use fedora, i boot, i launch my vm, and that's it. Some might ask "then why did you bother yourself with virtualization in the first place". Well, as a developper i will need soon (after my internship which will end soon) a linux workstation, so that's why, also the possibility to have an osx vm is for me a plus (tried to emulate osx on top of windows, takes too much ressources). Anyway, before jumping into xen and unraid i need some answers, so if anyone could help me clarify all this it would be gladly appreciated. Link to comment
trurl Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 Xen is not supported since the early v6 betas. KVM is the only VM choice now. unRAID was originally designed as a NAS operating system and virtualization is recently added functionality. The NAS part of unRAID is not really RAID but is explained pretty well in the wiki. Dual parity is planned for the future but not yet available. Link to comment
zipeldiablo Posted January 6, 2016 Author Share Posted January 6, 2016 The nas part of unraid is like lvm with parity basically? meaning since there is no hardware involve i will not have a speedboost also? Would be great to have a benchmark. About parity, can you have URE when resilvering? that is the main issue of raid5 (with one parity disk) and if unraid can have the same issue it will be a definite no for me. Speaking about ressource consumption, how does the unraid os server does compare to other os like fedora for example ? Link to comment
trurl Posted January 6, 2016 Share Posted January 6, 2016 unRAID has some very significant differences from any RAID you may be familiar with. There is no striping so no boost in read/write speed but each disk is an independent filesystem as a result. It was designed to provide fault-tolerant storage for large collections of media files that would be read much more often than written. See UnRAID 6/Overview. Link to comment
zipeldiablo Posted January 7, 2016 Author Share Posted January 7, 2016 I already read everything yesterday and it is not clear and doesn't answer my technical questions, no use for me to keep reading the wiki at this point Link to comment
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