Making the move from ESXi host w. UnRaid as Guest to Unraid as Host

[axeman]

Hello,

 

I have unraid currently as a guest on my ESXI 5.0 Hypervisor. I've been reading up on UnRaid 6 and the kvm implementation. Right now, Unraid has two shares that are exported  via NFS that my other guest VMs use to store their VMDK files.

 

Reading through on the wiki, I see that the preferred method is to put VMDK on a cache pool. Has anyone else tried storing VMDKs on the array, instead of on a cache pool?

 

In my ESXi implementation, the VMs that are IO intensive are on a directly attached datastore (think Media conversion, etc). The VMs that are less IO bound, like Windows Server disk with photos and documents/pdf, etc are on the UnRaid backed datastore.

 

Will performance be similar ? Or am I better off sticking with ESXi and keeping UnRaid as a guest?

[CHBMB]

I wouldn't run a virtual drive off the array, the performance will take a hit due to parity writes.  I keep my virtual disks on an SSD that is neither a cache drive or on the array using the Unassigned Devices plugin.  May fit the bill for you.

[axeman]

I wouldn't run a virtual drive off the array, the performance will take a hit due to parity writes.  I keep my virtual disks on an SSD that is neither a cache drive or on the array using the Unassigned Devices plugin.  May fit the bill for you.

 

Thanks ... for your reply. The performance under Esxi is actually bareable - i was hoping KVM would be similar.