A whole mix of factors ... have delivered me unRAID 6.3.3 running on my trusty (or is that rusty) HP N54L, complete with TheBay BIOS 5x2TB drives and 8GB of ram.

 

Previously I've been running FreeNAS and even more recently Win2008R2, but in an effort to find that perfect mix of raided NAS (media) server and something I can run a Win based IMAP spam scanner on, unRAID seems to be the perfect answer.

 

I've been using the time while the data pumps from the current media server on to unRAID, to create a WIN7 VM. To say that performance is awful would be an understatement. 4 hours (I kid you not 4 hours) for the install from ISO to complete. VNC runs in bursts some 3-10 seconds behind the keyboard inputs.

 

Important to say here in case anyone thinks I'm moaning about a product I installed 36 hours ago .. I'm not .. I'm just a little puzzled and looking for some pointers, please.

 

The N54L is never going to offer epic performance - It is a great unit, but it is what it is. That said, in its previous configuration running Win2008R2 it wasn't too bad and would serve disk, run a mail scanner and respond the RDP sessions with just the odd pause while it sorted itself out. It would even run VirtualBox, although why I would want to run a Win7 VM on a 2008 server, still puzzles me.

 

Having trashed the WIn2008 server to provide the base for unRAID, any suggestions as to why VM performance would be so slow? Allocating 4GB and both CPUs made little difference. Pausing the data pump gave a marginal improvement.

 

It must be me, failing to find the right thread and running naff settings :-) 

 

With the data pumping, I'm showing CPU0@ 22% and CPU1 @ 26%. Memory usage is 13% - would indicate enough head room to run a VM.

 

The other item that has me puzzled (my skills finding stuff in the forum also seem to suck) relate to the "Go Script" and:

 

echo 50 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold & logger Go Script - ondemand up_threshold set to 50
echo 50 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_down_factor & logger Go Script - ondemand sampling_down_factor set to 50

 

A number of the comments reference unRAID5 when mentioning this mod, but I unable to track down the original problem this solved.

 

Appreciate your help. Now I need to sort out the MTU sizes...

 

Cheers Himself

 

 

I think you need to provide more information on how things are configured.   For instance where is the virtual disk your VM is located?   If you want good performance it needs to be on either a cache disk or an unassigned disk?

Cool - that could be the reason why. Being new to unRAID I took as many of the defaults as I could, one of which was the leave the disk Primary vDisk Location in Auto ( /mnt/user/domains/Windows 7/vdisk1.img)

 

I'll attach a portable SSD drive to the USB (only USB2, but good for a test) and try again.

 

Thanks

The problem with running VM's with the vdisks on the array is that the architecture of unRAID has significant overheads on writes (each write involves 4 I/O operations).   This is OK when running as a media server but not when hosting a vdisk.

 

the default settings for the 'domains' share is Cache: Prefer.     This means it runs from the array if you have no cache disk, but if you later add a cache disk the 'mover' process will move the files in the share to the cache disk.   If you are happy with that then just adding a SSD of sufficient size as the cache disk is all you need to do.     Many people (myself included) like to have SSD's dedicated to VM use rather than have them on the cache drive, and in such a case installing the Unassigned Devices plugin helps with managing this.

 

 

Itimpi's reply was right on the money. I built a 2nd unRAID server from spare parts and cannibalised a portable drive for the 120GB Corsair SSD. Performance is now way more than acceptable, it is impressive. The array is still building, while I installed Win7, connected it to the original unRAID shares and now I'm patching the do-dar out of the VM. Most impressed and thanks for the pointer.

Edited April 20, 20179 yr by Himself