Single Drive for VM

[jhooper317]

Good morning,

 

I know that this is going to sound strange but hope someone can help me with this.

 

For a while I used Unraid daily but switched to Synology (I know, I know). For many of the things I want to do my Synology box just doesn't have enough power. I really liked the interface with Unraid on running VMs and want to run this again. Is there a way to only use Unraid for VMs? What I mean by this is I do not want an array at all. My plan would to only have for now one SSD used to store the VMs outside of the array. Again I want to not have an array at all since files are stored on another device. I would hate to have to come up with 3 additional drive for an array with I dont need it.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[pwm]

Why not run the unRAID with two drives - the data+parity drives would work as a mirror giving you fault tolerance for the individual VM.

 

Then you can store the bulk of the data on the Synology, and also mount the Synology data into the individual VM directly or indirectly.

[jhooper317]

I'll try this tonight and see if I can do this. I thought I tried this once but would not start the array due to not having enough drives.

 

Thanks

[itimpi]

UnRAID cannot run without at least one array drive.   If you do not need resilience then this could be the drive that the VM runs off with good performance.   Adding parity makes it much less satisfactory to use an array drive for a VM because of the large performance impact in such a configuration.

[pwm]

7 hours ago, itimpi said:

UnRAID cannot run without at least one array drive.   If you do not need resilience then this could be the drive that the VM runs off with good performance.   Adding parity makes it much less satisfactory to use an array drive for a VM because of the large performance impact in such a configuration.

One data + one parity shouldn't give any large performance impact. No need for any read/modify/write of parity when writing.