Running unraid inside a virtual environment for testing purposes

[unraided]

Update: I've just finishing building MK2 of a two data and a parity SATA-based disk VM of unRAID, consisting of a single IDE-based vdisk for the unRAIS OS and three SATA vdisks for data and parity. So far, so good. In the following weeks to come (Going on leave), I'll try to produce a six and twenty SATA-based disk VM of unRAID, with the support for USB pass-through to have the VM boot from a physical USB drive (For Registered USB's). For all these VM's, I've decided to go for v4.5.1. Once all the initial testing has be done for the three, six and twenty disks editions, I'll liaise with Msan to try and have these VM's, in a zipped single download, uploaded for all to use.

[NAS]

Good work. I am sure many new potential users will eventually grab this to have a try at unRAID. I sporbably woorth including a small amount of drive data .. say 1MB of images and txt file so that by default there is somthing on the shares.

[unraided]

Yeah I agree NAS. I'll have the VM's prepackaged and with a generic setup on them, with some root folders and sub-folders, dummy files within these folders and also QRG and FAQ guides on the basics on using unRAID.

I'm planning to experiement and create a MKIII VM with variable-szed vdisks under VirtualBox (I'll set each vdisk not to go no more than a certain size, as this allows the vdisk to increase in size according to what is stored within it), though I fear that using this option, once formatted under unRAID will expand to the vdisk to its maximim size, which defeats the purpose of using the variable option (I'll have to see how it goes with unRAID, this normally only happens if you have a VM using the entire partition volume encrypted though).

I'm also experimenting with a physical USB drive to hopefully get the six and twenty VM's supported to use an physical licenced USB drive. I'll keep you all posted in the near future.

[BRiT]

Virtual Disks under Virtual Box work great and they compress well with 7Zip/Zip too. I don't think the virtual data disks were expanded to their full size. I had assumed you would have used virtual disks from the start.

 

The usb support in Virtual Box has a bit of an odd interface. You have to select the device from the menu to dedicate it to the virtual before the VM is started and can not be done on a saved/paused system either.

[unraided]

Yes I'm fearing that USB pass through and support might to be a pain, but I'll see how I can work around it. Ill see what I can sqeeze out of VirtualBox seeing that it is totally free or I might have to either try VMware Workstation Trail or something which supports USB pass through easily to see what options I have. My last resort I might have to drop the six and twenty VM editions if it becomes too much of an effort and renders the VMs impractible to work with (the aim was to keep it simple to newbies and the public to try). My original idea was to have a Basic edition VM to give the public a taste and feel of unRAID (at least for the basic level and to understand the basic tasks and to build confidence too), but I'll see what I can come with and report back on this later on.

[purko]

Yes I'm fearing that USB pass through and support might to be a pain, but I'll see how I can work around it. Ill see what I can sqeeze out of VirtualBox seeing that it is totally free or I might have to either try VMware Workstation Trail or something which supports USB pass through easily to see what options I have. My last resort I might have to drop the six and twenty VM editions if it becomes too much of an effort and renders the VMs impractible to work with (the aim was to keep it simple to newbies and the public to try...

You are talking about "newbies" who'd want to try unRAID before they buy it,

and at the same time you think that such people will somehow already own a license key?

Forget about the USB stuff!  A free edition setup is all you need to get the taste of it.

 

[WeeboTech]

Forget about the USB stuff!  A free edition setup is all you need to get the taste of it.

 

I agree.  4 drives is enough to boot and test unraid.

 

 

Also, if the boot drive can be formatted and partitioned as such.

 

partition 1 - FAT(VFAT)  syslinux /boot partition

partition 2 - swap

partition 3 - slackware 12 development system.

 

or maybe even

 

partition 1 - reiserfs ( for use as a cache drive? )

partition 2 - FAT(VFAT)  syslinux /boot partition

partition 3 - swap (this can serve double duty in slackware 12 and in unRAID).

partition 4 - slackware 12 development system.

 

 

This would serve the whole community as it would provide a dev system for unRAIDers... hey a new team!

[purko]

Forget about the USB stuff!  A free edition setup is all you need to get the taste of it.

 

I agree.  4 drives is enough to boot and test unraid.

Five drives. One boot drive with four partitions as Weebo suggested, One parity drive, One cache drive, Two data drives,

...and one spare drive to rebuild onto it when simulating a disk failure (or just use it as a out-of-array torrent disk).

That's five.

 

[Joe L.]

Forget about the USB stuff!  A free edition setup is all you need to get the taste of it.

 

I agree.  4 drives is enough to boot and test unraid.

Five drives. One boot drive with four partitions as Weebo suggested, One parity drive, One cache drive, Two data drives,

...and one spare drive to rebuild onto it when simulating a disk failure (or just use it as a out-of-array torrent disk).

That's five.

Cache drive will not be usable on the free version of unRAID.  Don't need to visualize it since you can't use unless you get a licensed USB key configured. 

 

That makes 4 drives usable, not 5.

[unraided]

I've taken this all information on this thread into consideration, and I'm going to 'perfect' a single Basic Edition of the unRAID OS, using v4.5.1 and consisting of the following attributes and features:

 

- I'm deciding to go with VirtualBox as the Virtualization application as it works fine and is free.

 

- The VM will have One IDE vDisk. 8GB in a Dynamic sized vDisk which with the unRAID OS installed on and will only be no greater than 55MB (No addon's, just a basic, no password, generic and vanilla unRAID OS install post the OS install).

 

- This VM will have however three additional vDisks, running from a SATA Controller, one for Parity and two for Data.

 

- This is were I need feedback on the how the VM will be delivered. I can either have the SATA vDisks pre-formatted and Parity vDsik built and ready or maybe leave it in a unformatted state?

(Opinions anyone?). Leaving the vDisks in an unformatted state will give users or newbies the feel of what actually needs to be done when building a physical unRAID Server. What do people think of this idea?

 

- Thus far with the MKIII VM I've just created, I'm having the Parity and Data vDisks in a Dynamic mode and formatted, it doesn't increase the actual vDisk size as no data has actually been copied onto it. Pending to change on the final product on the opinions I receive.

 

- I'll create some generic root folder(s) and sub-folders with dummy files/data to simulate a actual unRAID server (Again pending whether I decide to have the disks pre-formatted or not).

 

- I will provide documentation consisting with some QRGs and FAQs to get beginners up and running with unRAID.

 

 

I won't be touching any VM stull for unRAID for the next week as my wife forbids me on bringing the laptop on the trip , but I'll be checking the forum hopefully on a daily basis when possible on the mobile.

 

A Big Thanks to Joe L, purko, WeeboTech, BRiT, Msan, NAS, man himself Tom and to others who have supported and welcomed this idea and I hope it provides some guidance to any future unRAID cusomers who would like to get into unRAID, but are limited to knowledge, budget or hardware.

[WeeboTech]

I would not format or prepare any of the virtual disks.

 

Have the virtual box capable of booting up and letting the end user do those steps on their own.

In this case, it makes a good test bed for newbies.

 

If you do this under virtual box, I will probably do the duplicate under vmware, only with the more advanced boot drive for development purposes.

 

newbies can use a virtual test bed to try out unRAID.

I think both new and mature unRAID users could use the option for development.

I bet it would provide a kick in the pants for unRAID addons.

[unraided]

Yeah i strongly believing in leaving the VM's in a unformatted state when the VM is ready and the unRAID OS boots fine. I was also thinking of using the Export VM option in VirtualBox (I need to thoroughly test this out) to extract the VM to allow it to be imported back into VirtualBox. i'll also make a zipped file consisting of the exported VM, VirtualBox and the doco's.

[BRiT]

The Export/Import VM option under VirtualBox is bugged when you use IDE drives. During the import it will error out once it encounters the second IDE disk.

 

The Import/Export option works if you use SATA drives.

 

Even when using the Export/Import process, there are a few settings that do not transfer over so the user still has to go through the GUI or Command Line to reset them. An artifact of Export/Import is that the drives images are converted from VDI format to VMDK format. They will not be imported back to VDI.

 

For the development images I created at work, we found it easiest to provide the raw VDI disks and a GUIDE on how to create a new Virtual Machine with all the proper settings.

[purko]

BRiT is so right about this!

 

If you just attach a zip of the virtual boot disk to a post here, along with a 10-line setup guide,

that's all somebody would need to setup a virtual unRAID in just a few minutes.  Can't get easier that that.

 

For me creating the virtual boot disk for unRAID didn't take much time/effort because I alreay had a winXP-VM and I used it for that.

A virtual boot disk for unRAID could save time to people who freshly install VirtualBox for the first time.

 

But even a first-time VirtualBox user who doesn't have a win-VM can esily make a boot disk by first booting the VM with the Parted Magic iso image.

(Note how the Parted Magic iso image is only 75MB!     I've even hooked it to the syslinux.cfg boot menu of my unRAID server   )

 

[unraided]

Well that I didn't know about the the Import/Export facility on VirtualBox, hhhmmm, I'll test it out though if it has a known history of causing problems, I'll just copy the '.VirtualBox' folder with the VM and vDisks combined. Thanks for the info. I'll be back to it in a week, I couldn't but jump on the forum for a little while .

[purko]

I'll just copy the '.VirtualBox' folder with the VM and vDisks combined.

From that folder the only useful thing would be the boot vDisk.

 

[unraided]

Thanks for the tip purko. No doubt I'll be testing all that has been suggested and I'll use the easiest, best way to have the VM exported and to make it as easy as possible to have the VM imported back into VirtualBox too. Thanks.

[WeeboTech]

Slightly OT, but slightly on per my notes below.

What version of slackware is unRAID 4.5.3 based on (if I were to put a dev system on one of the IDE drives).

 

Maybe the VM IDE disk should be larger with the ability to allow an end user to add partitions (at least swap if they are having issues).

[unraided]

You raise a valid point WeeboTech and frankly you can make the vDisks as large as you like using the dynamic size (given you obviusly don't overfill the vDisk(s) with more data than the actual physical medium in which it is stored on).

Actually the IDE-based vDisk in MKIII I made it 8GB, but I could make it 40GB or even 80GB if this would remedy those who'd like to install a full blown Slackware distro install on it, in fact the SATA vDisks could have the dyanmic disk size to 200GB each, and if you copy and run this VM of unRAID which is on a sizable physical disk like a +1TB disk, you should be fine to have Slakware distro and real data copied onto the VM data vdisks. Good suggestion.

[BRiT]

My full Slackware-Current distro with additional packages installed takes a bit under 10 Gigs - 9391064 used from the 'df' report. I suggest you to convert the IDE disk to be dynamic size using the 'vboxmanage' command line tools.

 

unRAID 4.5.3 is an odd being. Bits of it are based off Slackware 12.2, HOWEVER 4.5.3 has an updated 'udev' system (1.41) which is from Slackware-13 but not used anymore in Slackware-Current. At the beginning of March, the Slackware-Current updated 'udev' to be 1.51.

[unraided]

I'm using the VirtualBox for Windows version, is it possible to run the 'vboxmanage' within the Windows version? It's no matter, I can build a MKIV version VM and that being that the vDisks can be set in a Dynamic state I can have them as large as you'd like, so I wouldn't imagine you would need more than 80GB for the IDE-based vDisk (to have a full Slackware OS and what not installed on it too) as the boot drive and about 500GB for both parity and the two data vDisks all set in Dynamic states, so having said this, a user could possibibly run this VM on a single 2TB physical disk with all parity, data and unRAID disks full to the brim (I cannot see this happening for a test environment, but someone might be keen enough to use it that way). I'm not really keen to use v4.5.3 (I'd rather use v4.5.1) seeing that v4.5.3 had some issues but I'll no doubt doing a couple of weeks of stress testing and leaving it running constantly to see if I can break it in any way. All the VMs I've created were with 4.5.1, so I'll try the next VM with 4.5.3 and use much larger Dynamic disk sizes for all disks mentioned above. Thanks for the info.

 

My full Slackware-Current distro with additional packages installed takes a bit under 10 Gigs - 9391064 used from the 'df' report. I suggest you to convert the IDE disk to be dynamic size using the 'vboxmanage' command line tools.

 

unRAID 4.5.3 is an odd being. Bits of it are based off Slackware 12.2, HOWEVER 4.5.3 has an updated 'udev' system (1.41) which is from Slackware-13 but not used anymore in Slackware-Current. At the beginning of March, the Slackware-Current updated 'udev' to be 1.51.

[BRiT]

Yes. You can run that command from the dos prompt, provided you have Virtual Box install directory setup in your PATH environment variable.

[unraided]

Question. I'm somewhat familiar with where VirtualBox creates and stores the '.VirtualBox' folder for the VM's under a Windows OS, but where would would be the default VirtualBox VM store path for Linux, UNIX and Mac? i'll probably need to include this with the doco for when i complete the Final VM for unRAID. 

[purko]

Question. I'm somewhat familiar with where VirtualBox creates and stores the '.VirtualBox' folder for the VM's under a Windows OS, but where would would be the default VirtualBox VM store path for Linux, UNIX and Mac?

Make your laptop do dual boot win/Ubuntu, install VirtualBox in Ubuntu and play with your virtual machine there.

 

[unraided]

Might be the way to go, i should start getting back into using a Linux OS as a Desktop, its been a while . Thanks