Anyway to use SSD on Vdisk

[Issom]

I just built a 4 Drive 26TB Unraid server. I created a KVM with 22TB D: drive for my Server backups in a grandfather, father, son config.

Everything is working pretty well but I would like to speed up transfer speed. 

I am using Two 10TB Seagate drives (one for Parity) and two 8TB Seagate drives.

Anyway I can through a 1tb SSD in the kvm config to write to the ssd first and then pass it on to the 22TB img?

 

Any help would be great.

Thanks

Issom

[Kappawaii]

Couldn't you put the ssd in the cache drive array and periodically use the mover process to pass it on to the 22TB array ?

[Issom]

Do KVM's naturaly use the cache drive with out pointing to it?

[itimpi]

I am a bit confused - you cannot have a single vdisk (22TB) file that is larger than any of your drives!   The architecture of unRAID constrains a single file to all being on the same drive.Did you mean 22GB?     The only way I can see if you having this is if defined such a vdisk but it is sparsely populated and does not yet use up all the space on the drive where it is located.   You also mention only having 2 8TB data drives - that seems to be 16TB and not 26TB?

[Issom]

I am new to Unraid but I will attach my drive config. I have two 10TB drives. One for parity and the second is for storage. So 10tb + 8TB + 8TB

Still would like to know how to use cache drive on the VM img.

[itimpi]

Your vdisk1.img file could reside on the SSD using it either as a cache drive or via the Unassigned drives plugin.   The vdisk2.img could not be used in this way as it exceeds the size of the SSD and unRAID insists any single file must fit onto one physical device..   However if vdisk1.img is you system drive then having just that on the SSD should help a lot with performance.   If you reduced the size of the vdisk2.img so that I can also fit on the SSD then that might improve performance further.

 

There is no built-in support for having files stay on the cache (SSD) drive but periodically be copied to the main array.     There is, however, a plugin that is designed for the purpose of backing up VMs.   However backing up vdisk2.img might take a significant time simply because of its size.

 

to move vdisks to the SSD it is simply a case of copying them into the desired position and then editing the XML for the VM to reflect the new location.

Edited May 26, 2017 by itimpi