Has anyone tried running an UNRaid server under VMware or Xen?

 

I'm asking because I do not want to build yet another machine that is powered on 24x7 for UNraid.

(I already have 4 machines running 24x7).

Frankly, I would love to just buy a driver for my current installation and run that, but it doesn't seem feasible.

 

Therefore I was thinking to partition a machine with VMware (I do this already for my windows guests).

Add s'more drives (I have 10 bays in my case) and use UNRaid to manage a number of them.

 

I know I won't get the best in performance, but I only need to serve some ISO, AVI and MP3 files, of which I do now without issue.

 

I have a dual 3.2g Xeon w/1mb cache that is powered 24x7 so I think there will be enough CPU.

 

I guess the main issue is the virtual hardware.  From what I understand I can allocate physical disks to vmware, so the last question becomes the network adapter.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

I was looking into managing disks with Solaris' superb ZFS on VMWare, and I came across several forum postings from people whom have tried it reporting that VMware disk throughput is awesomely bad. Yes, even with direct 'physical disk' access. So I never tried that at all.

 

Xen is quite promising performance wise. But I'm not sure how mature that project is... I've tried it in the past and had some problem w/ hardware support.

I was looking into managing disks with Solaris' superb ZFS on VMWare, and I came across several forum postings from people whom have tried it reporting that VMware disk throughput is awesomely bad. Yes, even with direct 'physical disk' access. So I never tried that at all.

 

Xen is quite promising performance wise. But I'm not sure how mature that project is... I've tried it in the past and had some problem w/ hardware support.

 

XEN is mature enough that it is sold as a hosting service.

 

I.E. instead of renting a spot to host your website, you rent a virtual private operating system giving you a whole linux environment just to yourself. Of course the CPU and other resources are shared, but your applications and data are not accessible to other customers who may exist on the same piece of hardware.

 

 

In regards to performance,  For what I want to do, I don't think it will be that bad actually.

I have a linux machinw with a windows virtual machine (with virtual disks) that I do dvd ripping and it performs pretty dam good for a virtualized environment.

(2 x LV 2.4GHZ xeons w2g ram, WinXP Guest w512MB ram).

 

My Kurobox is a very slow performer, I figure a vmware machine might be faster then that.