I want to try unraid in VMware

[brainbudt]

Hello

 

I'm currently running freeNAS and I do really like the speed, but I hate that the gui is so buggy and many other things like VM and the plugins are also very buggy.

but I first want to try unraid in a VM so I can just try unraid without just going all in.

but I can't find a iso file or an other way to install unraid on VMware.

 

so is there a way to do this ?

 

[itimpi]

There is no such thing as an iso for unRAID.   UnRAID always boots from a USB stick and so it is just a case of creating one as specified on the unRAID site and using that as the boot device in VMWare.

[brainbudt]

yea I have already tried that but couldn’t get it to work 

so I’m going to give it another try in the weekend.

thanks buddy

[prostuff1]

Back in the day when i was running unRAID under ESXi I was using Plop to "load" the flash drive so ESXi could use it.  Honeslty have not done and ESXi stuff in a while so not sure if that is still needed/used.

[BobPhoenix]

It is needed as far as I can tell. 

 

 

Only read below if interested in my experiences with ESXi.

I have one server that is using ESXi because it deals with bridge chips better then KVM so I can use a PCI card in a VM that unRAID won't pass through to the VM.  Never could get USB pass through to work correctly in ESXi 6.5 the USB device always shows disconnected so I passed through a USB controller to unRAID and boot off a image file hard drive.  Last ESXi I used that worked with USB pass through was 5.0 only tried 5.1 before I went back to 5.0 before I started using unRAID as my VM platform.  Went back to ESXi for PCI card pass through and wanted USB 3.0 also - so chose current 6.5 ESXi version and found USB pass through still doesn't work for me beyond 5.0 so installed ESXi on data store drive rather than USB so I could pass the MB controller for unRAID VM.

Edited October 5, 2017 by BobPhoenix

[GroxyPod]

It used to be fairly easy to do on VMWare ESXi and PLOP but it is unsupported and can potentially introduce a lot of issues that would negatively affect your experience.

 

If you're trying to test it, I would recommend doing so as a bare metal solution using cheap hard drives that you can install (and de-installing the other drives) so you don't have to interrupt your FreeNAS setup. That way you can get the full experience and not have to go through the additional hoops of trying to get it to work with ESXi.

[uldise]

i'm still running my two unRAID servers on top of ESXi. now with ESXi 6.5. search for PlopKExec for boot process. in short - Esxi VM first boots from PlopKExec ISO, then it selects unRAID USB and continue boot process. boot process works as fast as on baremetal for me.

 

BUT, keep in mind, unRAID on Esxi is not officially supported! 

 

more info:

https://forums.lime-technology.com/topic/38999-compiled-info-unraid-as-guest-on-esxi/