Few questions to CPU, Disks and VM

[GamingGeek]

Hi there,

 

a few days ago I bought Unraid to achieve a few things:

 

1) Gaming VM 

2) TimeMachine Backup for my wife

3) NAS for me

4) pfSense Firewall and Router

5) Windows Server 2016 for my office

 

After settings all things up I realized that I will change some of my hard drives and add some new hard drives. So at the moment I have these settings:

 

4 x 2 TB for Array

1 x 2 TB for Parity

1 x 2 TB NVME SSD for Cache

 

after my change it should look like this:

 

8 x 2 TB for Array

2 x 3 TB for Parity

2 x 1 TB for Cache (Raid 1)

1 x 2 TB NVME SSD not Assigned for Windows 10 Gaming VM

 

Right now the the VM are set to vdisk location auto. So my question is:

 

If I add the additional disk to the array and change the cache drive. Will all data be copied automatically from the old cache drive to the new one? Or how do it work?

 

If I want the vdisk from the Windows 10 Gaming VM change from auto to the unassigned nvme SSD how do that work?

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Benny

[trurl]

Do you already have all these disks? Just wondering why you want so many small disks in the array. 

 

There isn't any automatic copying. 

[GamingGeek]

Yes these disks are right now in my Synology NAS which I want to replace with my Unraid server.

 

So if nothing is copied automatically which is the best way to achieve my goal?

 

Can I just copy the vdisk to the unassigned nvme SSD and change teh settings in the VM settings?

[testdasi]

2 hours ago, GamingGeek said:

Can I just copy the vdisk to the unassigned nvme SSD and change teh settings in the VM settings?

In short, yes.

 

In long - this is similar to what I did last year

• Format 1x 1TB SSD using unassigned devices with btrfs file system (UD will format it the right way)
• Mount the formatted 1TB, copy everything in 2TB SSD to the 1TB (preferably do a checksum validation once copying is done).
• Stop array, new config (keep everything except cache), add the 1TB to cache slot, start array
• Stop array, add the other 1TB into the 2nd cache slot and do the usual steps to add disk to cache
• Double check everything is still in cache
• For the VM that need to use vdisk in the 2TB SSD, just go into VM configuration and change the path to /mnt/disks/[the 2TB SSD mount point]

I'm 99% sure you will have to delete your docker image and start a new one (i.e. reinstall all dockers) due to some "cow" warning.

 

Also, if you are going to use the 2TB (presumably NVMe) SSD for the VM exclusively, you might want to pass it through via PCIe pass through for maximum performance. All other methods introduce a tiny bit more latency.

[GamingGeek]

Thanks for this great answers. That will help me a lot.