Hello, 

 

So I have been working on / building computers for 20 years now. (Damn, I am old that I think about it ).   Reason I am looking into unRAID.  I have been wanting build my own NAS for A bit, waited for  A good deal on some older hardware from ebay,craigslist, backpage ect ect.   I got A epic deal on A HP ML350 G6 ( 2x Xeon E5620 2.4ghz, 144gb ECC DDR3, 2x 200GB SAS SSDs, 2x 300GB 10k SAS HDD, and LSI 9211-8i ) all for $240.00 shipping included.  I have had it for 3months with on issues & adding more hardware and testing different VM software. (Windows 10 with VirtualBox) , Hyper V,  ESXi ).  Now it time to give unRAID A go . 

 

All hardware I have to work with.

 

2x Xeon 2.4Ghz 4c/8t (16 threads total) [ Should note I will be changing these to X5670s 2.93Ghz 6c/12t ea = 24t total)

144gb ECC DDR3 1333MHZ (18 x 8GB)  

HP P410i (built in Raid Controller W/BBU and 512Mb Cache) [ Using Raid 1 for Host install & VM OS for some things]

Intel Quad NIC PCIe x4 card

LSI 9211-8i (IT Mode /P16)

LSI 9211-8i (IT Mode /P20) [This one is for pass threw] 

Nvida GT 730 4gb

3x Seagate Constellation ES.3  3TB 7200/128 NAS Drives

1x  ADATA SU800 128GB 3D-NAND ( NAS Cache ) 

2x HP 200GB SAS SSDs (Not sure if I will use)

2x HP 300GB 10k HDD (Not sure if I will use) 

4x SanDisk 32gb Msata SSD W/ 2.5 Adapters

2x SanDisk 16gb Msata SSD  W/ 2.5 Adapters

 

And waiting on A 4port USB 3.0 controller to show up ... MIA 

 

 

What I want from all of this 

 

NAS / PFsens Router / Windows 10 VM for streaming to A TV Via SteamLink or NZXT Doko) 

 

Once I upgrade the CPUs, I would like to add 2x more VMs for Windows 10.  One will be Another TV steram and the other will be for Team Viewer.

 

Goals with the Win10 VMs ..  I would like to Project Computers (VMs)  to TVs ( and only TVs)  in my house for my parents  ( think Steam link is the best choice for this ) the 3rd Windows VM will be accessed threw Team Viewer / Windows Remote.  This will be my Net surf VM.  (right now on my main rig , I run Ubuntu threw A Virtualbox and keep that way from any of my accounts.

 

What I know so far.  

I HATE Hyper V .. Yuk

Virtualbox I have used for years, know it well but it is limited.  I can stream windows 10 VMs TV smoothly with 1GPU

ESXi  6.5 only been using it for 2 weeks.  Overall I like it, however the Documentation / help videos for 6.5 are not that common, seems to be alot of pre 6.5 and get people to reply to you for help lacking.   

 

unRAID ... Going to start with its try this weekend.   What I dont like is its NAS RAID System.  

 

Questions for unRAID froms.

 

1)  Will this be do able with unraid.

2)  I dont like UnRAID NAS vs FreeNAS RAID.  Could I install A VM with FreeNAS ? Will need to pass threw one of the LSI controllers.

3) Can I split the GPU Memory use per VM (Non PassThrew) or will I need A GPU per windows VM.  These VMs will only be used for Streaming to TVs / Comps and Net surfing / Youtube at most.  NO GAMING !

 

 

Thanks for any feedback,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 7, 20179 yr by Neko77025

unRAID is first and foremost a NAS storage solution, not a Hypervisor.  It has some great capabilities added to it's basic framework including Dockers and VMs, but if you don't like the storage solution I question why you would use it.  Oh, and a GPU per active VM along with a motherboard and CPU that support VT-d if you want to hook a monitor/TV up to the VM. (edited GPU comment for clarity)

Edited April 7, 20179 yr by tdallen

You don't say what you don't like about unRAID NAS. Possibly you have some good reasons why it isn't suitable for your specific needs.

 

Or perhaps you don't really know enough about it since you have only just joined the forum. Maybe your dislike is based on uninformed opinions on the internet.

 

One thing about unRAID, the forums are very helpful.

If really what you want from whatever solution you choose is this:

 

" NAS / PFsens Router / Windows 10 VM for streaming to A TV Via SteamLink or NZXT Doko) "

 

Then there are lots of unRAID users already doing this now. You say you don't like the unRAID NAS part, but you don't say why or what you don't like about it, care to elaborate?

You don't have to have a dedicated GPU per VM, it all depends on what you are doing with that VM, for gaming then YES, if casual use like PLEX then no.

44 minutes ago, trurl said:

You don't say what you don't like about unRAID NAS. Possibly you have some good reasons why it isn't suitable for your specific needs.

 

Or perhaps you don't really know enough about it since you have only just joined the forum. Maybe your dislike is based on uninformed opinions on the internet.

 

One thing about unRAID, the forums are very helpful.

Main Reason is .. Want to use the NAS for HDhomerun DVR and its not supported (freenas) is.

Also as A general NAS / RAID from what I was lead to believe is it only uses one dsik at a time and slowly makes use of the other drives.  It can make it hard to tell if one of the drives has gone bad till to late. 

Where ZFS 1/2 / RAID 5/6 all drives are used all the time and their is no hit in performance 

 

 

53 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

If really what you want from whatever solution you choose is this:

 

" NAS / PFsens Router / Windows 10 VM for streaming to A TV Via SteamLink or NZXT Doko) "

 

Then there are lots of unRAID users already doing this now. You say you don't like the unRAID NAS part, but you don't say why or what you don't like about it, care to elaborate?

You don't have to have a dedicated GPU per VM, it all depends on what you are doing with that VM, for gaming then YES, if casual use like PLEX then no.

 

All 3x of the VMs will do ZERO Gaming other then maybe WEB games... (NO 3d use)  Just web surfing, emails, and youtube.

 

I do want to run PLEX and HDhomerun DVR on the NAS ( Need Freenas for the HDhomerun) JAILS.

29 minutes ago, Neko77025 said:

Main Reason is .. Want to use the NAS for HDhomerun DVR and its not supported (freenas) is.

Also as A general NAS / RAID from what I was lead to believe is it only uses one dsik at a time and slowly makes use of the other drives.  It can make it hard to tell if one of the drives has gone bad till to late. 

Where ZFS 1/2 / RAID 5/6 all drives are used all the time and their is no hit in performance

HDHomerun DVR is supported in Plex and there are Plex dockers for unRAID. And there are other ways to get DVR on unRAID. There are hundreds of dockers for unRAID for lots of applications on your server.

 

Your sentence I quoted in bold is mostly wrong, so I would say you were led to believe that by some of those uninformed internet opinions I mentioned. unRAID can use all the drives, but it doesn't have to use them all at the same time. And you can easily spread out which disks are used for what.

 

And there is no reason at all for thinking that you won't know when a disk is going bad. unRAID constantly monitors SMART attributes for all drives and will even send you an email if it begins to look like a problem.

 

unRAID is not RAID. Some things about unRAID are better than traditional RAID for certain uses, and some things about RAID are better than unRAID for certain uses. Many think the things that are better about unRAID are worth the tradeoff for their uses.

 

Each data disk is an independent filesystem. This means each file is completely contained on a single disk. This is the reason you can expand the array using different sized disks. Any data disk can be read even if all the other disks are completely dead. And if you don't have more missing disks than you have parity disks, you can rebuild a missing disk. And because each disk is independent, often files can be recovered from a single disk even if you get into a scenario where you can't rebuild.

 

unRAID read speed is only at the speed of the single drive that is being read, but single disk read speeds are often enough for 1GB ethernet anyway. Write speed to the parity array will be impacted by parity writes so can be slower than single drive writes. But for a media server where many things are only written once and read many times. write speed is less important. And there is the cache disk (or cache pools) to help with faster writing.