October 8, 20178 yr Hi, I recently aquire unraid to virtualize my server in order to give it another level of security (or at least is that the idea). I have a tyan S7012 with two intel xeon E5620 and 48gb RAM DDR3 ECC, and LSI00244-9201-16i For my VM server I have passthrough 8 cpu threads (4 of each real cpu), 12Gb of RAM (expandable until 16gb), passthrough Kingston A400 120Gb SDD for the OS drive and two Seagate 160gb in windows RAID 1 for the backup of the accountant data. I have windows server 2016. For "NAS" I have 5 1tb drives with 2 parity drives and Samsung 850EVO 120gb SSD for cache. The idea is if the server die I can restore the VM quicly than if was not virtualized. The only thing Im affraid is the OS drive doenst have redundancy. I want your opinion about my server and what do you think I should do in order to make it more secure and failer prove. How can I make clones/snapshots of the OS drive automatecly? If I did something wrong please tell me.
October 8, 20178 yr I would not recommend using unRAID for a business, it's not meant for business use and doesn't have the kind of immediate support a business should have. I would suggest you look into Hyper-V since you already have Windows Server 2016 or VMware ESXi.
October 8, 20178 yr Author Hi. The innitial idea was to use VMware but they will left support the E5620 CPU and the price was a little to much. We are a small accoutant company and we had, until a few weeks ago, the windows server 2003 without any redundance (with the exception of the 2 drives 160gb in raid 1 with the data backup). What we intended is to have some redundancy and backup, just in case. Our idea is to have some clone or snapshot in order to rebuild everything very quicly, if needed. About the support we are accustomed to have none, because as a small company we usualy dont have the money need for the covenant that IT company's charge. The entire network infrastrure was build and configured by us, not that we really understand what we are doing, but youtube helps a lot. For now the server is working, Im just a little affraid that something goes wrong. The OS drive, was passthrough and the OS installed with NTFS, so if I use this drive directly it shoud work, right? Whats the best way to clone the drive?
October 9, 20178 yr Using unRaid is totally OK for a business that understands what they are getting into. The panic about support is not relevant for some small businesses. The support provided on the forums is totally above and beyond what some small companies get from their less than responsive tech service providers. We have been using unRaid for 7 years and now have multiple unRaid servers. We don't use them for what they are not designed to do, but with VM, and dockers, there is more and more that we do with unRaid. XenServer still runs our website, but unRaid runs most everything else. All that I would recommend is that you have somebody tech savvy that you trust to keep you running in case of difficulty. I am still waiting for easy snapshotting and cloning of VM's in unRaid. Once that is available, your idea for unRaid in an accountant company is totally awesome. Let us know how you solve these issues.
October 9, 20178 yr 11 hours ago, tr0910 said: I am still waiting for easy snapshotting and cloning of VM's in unRaid. Once that is available, your idea for unRaid in an accountant company is totally awesome. Let us know how you solve these issues. this will not help in the case where the OS drive is passed through to the VM. It really only helps when you run with a Virtual disk. I wonder if the opener would be better of running with the OS on a virtual disk and then: - Having 2 SSD's in a cache pool holding the vdisk for the VM giving a level of redundancy there against drive failure. - Periodic backups of the vdisk to the array so that the VM can be quickly set back to a known position if there are serious problems with the cache pool.
October 9, 20178 yr Author Hi! I have 2 120gb SSD but they are different brands, for cache redundancy I should use the same model right? Edited October 9, 20178 yr by m4r0c4s
January 14, 20188 yr Author Hi there! Just to said that the server is running for a few months now, without any problems! We have some difficults with the VPN configuration, but nothing to do with the unraid, but since that, its up and running with zero problems! Im very satisfied with unraid and it was much cheaper than an VMWare solution
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.