Upgrading hardware in an existing set-up


MrOnionSkins

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 Hello all,

 

 I dug a little through forum posts, but my ham-fisted searches came up empty on this specific topic. Please forgive my ignorance if the answer should be obvious and I hope that you'll humor me by answering anyway. I've been running UnRAID for a rather long time (approx. 8 years) and now I'm considering an upgrade of my motherboard, processor and RAM. If I simply swap this hardware and plug in all the same drives, along with the configured OS on my USB flash device, will/should everything simply work again without any extra effort?

 

Also, I own a Pro key... I seem to remember from back when I originally bought this Pro key that it can be used on two machines, but I cannot find anything on the site that confirms this. I'd like to build a secondary server with the old hardware that's being upgraded...

 

Thanks for any info that you can provide. 

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If all you are doing is swapping motherboard, CPU and RAM and not changing the disk configuration at all, the swap is seamless and nothing else needs to be done.  The license is tied to the GUID of the USB flash drive.  As long as you are using the same flash drive and configuration, swap away.  I have made this type of upgrade three times.  unRAID boots right up on the new hardware and no tweaks are needed.

 

1 hour ago, MrOnionSkins said:

Also, I own a Pro key... I seem to remember from back when I originally bought this Pro key that it can be used on two machines, but I cannot find anything on the site that confirms this.

 

No, the same license key cannot be used on two machines.  There was a time when Limetech was offering a heavily-discounted second key of the same type as the first, but, the same key cannot be used on two flash drives/servers.

 

Certainly, you can re-purpose your old hardware in a different server (that is exactly how I built my backup server), but, that will require a new license on a different flash drive.

Edited by Hoopster
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4 minutes ago, MrOnionSkins said:

 I'll have to scour through old emails and see if I did, in-fact, purchase during a promotion that provided me two Pro keys. Otherwise, I'll pick-up a new one.

 

 

If you don't fins it, you could e-mail LimeTech with the email address(es) and see if they have a record of the purchase and whether you activated that second license.  

 

EDIT:  If you are going to do this type of hardware upgrade and I would recommend that you get a screen capture of your drive assignments.   Recent version of unRAID remember drive assignments by the drive's serial number but that change was only implemented a few years back.   

Edited by Frank1940
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Great idea, Frank. I appreciate the tip.

 

Edit: Thanks for the tip on the screen capture, as well. I generally do just that because I'm prone to errors and like to make a record of things before I eff everything up. :) I try to keep my server software up-to-date and I just now updated to 6.4.1

Edited by MrOnionSkins
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4 hours ago, Hoopster said:

No, the same license key cannot be used on two machines. 

Only on one machine.

 

But it might be worth checking up if you bought a pair of licenses and so might have an additional license still not in use. LT earlier had an option to buy a two-pack licenses.

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10 hours ago, Hoopster said:

If all you are doing is swapping motherboard, CPU and RAM and not changing the disk configuration at all, the swap is seamless and nothing else needs to be done.  The license is tied to the GUID of the USB flash drive.  As long as you are using the same flash drive and configuration, swap away.  I have made this type of upgrade three times.  unRAID boots right up on the new hardware and no tweaks are needed.

 

@MrOnionSkins -

 

For any motherboard upgrade, suggest that you burn in the new system thoroughly, including memory testing. You definitely don't want to subject your data to risk of a bad motherboard or memory.

 

While a motherboard swap can be simple for a NAS only array, if you have VMs with passthrough GPU and/or USB controllers, these will not move over smoothly. Advanced server tuning can also include configurations that won't move over. And even if you don't use these features, there are other considerations beyond just the motherboard swap. I'll try to cover some of these topics and considerations.

 

If you have VMs, you really need to back them up, get them working without passthrough (using VNC or something like NoMachine), and configure the keyboard without passthrough. You also need to remove passthrough directives and tweaks to your syslinux configuration. Get these working on the current motherboard and they will move over better.

 

If you have done tweaks to your VMs and/or Dockers limiting/specifying cores, you would need to consider those in the upgrade. The core matching may be different on the new CPU. Your logical core count may have even gone down (e.g., moving from a quad core i7 to a hex core i5, logical core count could go from 8 to 6). Not sure how KVM or docker would react to referencing non-existent cores.

 

As was mentioned, if you don't have a backup server, an upgrade is a good opportunity to set one up. You can set up the new motherboard in the backup server, do the burn in, and get everything figured out in terms of passthrough and tuning, and then do the case or drive swap. 

 

Depending on what your server does, like host your Windows workstation, logical router, downloader, media library, even basic TV, whatever - it may be desirable to be able to bring up the backup server as the primary server so critical functions are not impacted. There is no cookbook here, but something to consider. I'm actually working on this with an upgrade I am working on, so my old server is both a data backup as well as redundant server for critical functions.

 

You also need to consider if you are upgrading your cache to NVMe or new SSD. You'd need to transfer the contents over.

 

If your USB stick / cache contents are old, going back to older versions of unRaid, or even if your Docker configs are old and unnecessarily complex, you might consider starting from scratch and rebuilding the stick and cache and Dockers. The setups and defaults have changed over time. This can also be an opportunity to rethink your library setup in Plex for example. Starting clean eliminates the hodge podge, and uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what is real and what are remnants of a prior generation.

 

If this is your plan, you might think of standing up the new server, getting everything working, and as the last step moving just the disks to the new server. And your current server runs largely unchanged and ready for backup duty.

 

So an upgrade can be very straightforward, but can also be pretty involved. There can be quite a lot to think about. Give it some thought so the cutover goes smoothly.

 

Feel free to ask questions as you consider your upgrade.

 

(#ssdindex - Server upgrade)

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5 hours ago, SSD said:

So an upgrade can be very straightforward, but can also be pretty involved. There can be quite a lot to think about. Give it some thought so the cutover goes smoothly.

 

Very true.  My personal experience has been on the straightforward end of the the spectrum; however, I am not passing through hardware to any VMs.  I have a couple of VMs, but, they have come up on new hardware without issue.  Not passing through anything makes that a lot more likely. I have also never had any issues with dockers, configs, plugins, etc. directly related to a hardware swap.  I have had problems that needed to be resolved, but they came later.

 

Of course, as SSD says, back up everything beforehand to help you recover if things do not go smoothly.  That should be a given, but, many do not and then post "help me recover, I don't have any backups and lost X functionality, configuration, data, etc."

 

 

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  • 2 years later...
Just now, razz said:

It's been a while here, and also considering a hardware upgrade. Do you have to label the drives and boot/order then in a specific order in the new system?

No. I just upgraded hardware for the fourth time with the same USB flash drive/configuration.

 

Disks in unRAID are tracked by serial number.  It does not matter to which SATA/SAS ports they are connected and it does not matter that they are recognized (assigned an sdX designation) during boot up in the same way or order as before.

 

The only thing that may change in a major hardware swap is VM hardware device pass through.  If you are doing that, there will probably be some reconfiguration of VMs involved.

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6 minutes ago, razz said:

It's been a while here, and also considering a hardware upgrade. Do you have to label the drives and boot/order then in a specific order in the new system?

Get a screen capture of all the drive assignments on the   Main   page.   When you assign drives on the new system, you assign to the   Disk 1   slot the drive with the same serial number as is on the screen capture. 

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  • 2 years later...
On 2/6/2018 at 6:46 PM, Hoopster said:

If all you are doing is swapping motherboard, CPU and RAM and not changing the disk configuration at all, the swap is seamless and nothing else needs to be done.  The license is tied to the GUID of the USB flash drive.  As long as you are using the same flash drive and configuration, swap away.  I have made this type of upgrade three times.  unRAID boots right up on the new hardware and no tweaks are needed.

 

 

No, the same license key cannot be used on two machines.  There was a time when Limetech was offering a heavily-discounted second key of the same type as the first, but, the same key cannot be used on two flash drives/servers.

 

Certainly, you can re-purpose your old hardware in a different server (that is exactly how I built my backup server), but, that will require a new license on a different flash drive.

 

Is this the case if I was to upgrade to a NEWER SuperMicro 24 bay server, from an older supermicro 24 bay server? Is it as simple as shutting the server down, pulling all the drives and putting them in the same physical location in the new server and moving the USB drive?  Thanks!

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2 minutes ago, physikal said:

 

Is this the case if I was to upgrade to a NEWER SuperMicro 24 bay server, from an older supermicro 24 bay server? Is it as simple as shutting the server down, pulling all the drives and putting them in the same physical location in the new server and moving the USB drive?  Thanks!

 

It can be as simple as that.  In fact, you don't have to worry about the location of the physical drives.  The logical location in the array is tracked by each drive's serial number.  Now, I also realize that you probably want to know the physical location of each drive, so make a chart of the serial number vs the slot number of the case. .  

 

If you use the same MB, you should then be home free. But I would suspect that this is not the case.   If you are only running a simple NAS, even with a new MB everything should still work fine.   Now for the complicating factor.   A new MB or other MB mounted hardware with a tweaked system with Dockers and VM's.  @SSD covered this situation in his post of Feb 7, 2018.   One more thing, a move from Intel to AMD can be a bit more complex as AMD processors often require BIOS tweaking to run Unraid successfully!

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2 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

The logical location in the array is tracked by each drive's serial number.

If RAID controller is involved serial number might not be the identifier of a disk since RAID controller might invent a different identifier and give that to Unraid to work with. One of many reasons RAID controllers are not recommended. As long as the old hardware wasn't using RAID controller, and new hardware isn't using RAID controller, you shouldn't need to worry about this.

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