Considering a move from OpenMediaVault to unRaid


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Okay, so I've been thinking of redoing my server for a while. I've been putting off since life has been busy.

I'm considering moving from OMV with Emby (and other apps) in Docker to Unraid with the same apps in containers.

Basically my server is a couple of shares. Both shares are currently on a RAID5 (software) array. One big share for media, and then a smaller one that my wife and I use for critical files and is backed up offline and offsite. The main system drive is an SSD. I plan on putting in another SSD to serve as the data drive for all my dockers.

My idea was to keep using OMV but then using MergerFS + SnapRaid to pool the drives. Then I started reading about Undraid, and it intrigues me. I'll probably set up a trial of it this weekend just to poke around. It seems like it may be a simpler way to accomplish what I'm going for. It provides many of the benefits of pooling that MergerFS and SnapRaid would, but with what seems to be less hassle.

Can anybody comment on the two? Which way makes more sense? (Probably a silly question considering where I'm asking it)

These are the Docker containers that I'm currently running:

Watchtower
Heimdall
Emby
Emby Beta
Jellyfin
Jackett
Transmission with VPN

Also running, but as OMV plugins (not in Docker):

OpenVPN - I use this when logging on to open wifi points or to do remote admin on the server
Nginx - Although I've never really gotten this running with a reverse proxy the way I would like. Is there a good guide to get it working with unRaid?
Fail2Ban - Monitors OpenVPN and the Emby log files since those are the only ports open to the outside world

 

The hardware is pretty basic.

 

Supermicro X10SL7-F - Does unRaid support dual NICs?

16GB ECC

Xeon E3-1271

Several 2TB Enterprise Drives - I plan on upgrading these when another good shucking deal comes along


Thoughts? Any input is appreciated. 

 

Convince me. :)

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27 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

Hmmm...

 

Maybe this wasn't the best forum for this. 😀

 

Feel free to move it to a more appropriate spot.

You said you were thinking of setting up a trial key but for more insight look up spaceinvaderone's youtube channel he has all things unRAID and I think you'll find a wealth of information about your proposed planned setup

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Just now, mrbilky said:

You said you were thinking of setting up a trial key but for more insight look up spaceinvaderone's youtube channel he has all things unRAID and I think you'll find a wealth of information about your proposed planned setup

 

I set up a trial last night and installed one of my dockers.  I set it up on a simple low power celeron with a couple of USB drives. My thoughts so far:

 

-The interface is rather intuitive. I would say a bit more polished than OMV

-The permissions are definitely simplified over OMV since it seems unRaid uses only user permission per share. 

-The Docker implementation works fine.  It took me a bit to figure it out. I like the way the OMV plugin for Docker works, but probably just because I'm used to it.

 

I'm a bit concerned about the license being tied to the USB drive.  That seems a bit odd to me.

 

Thanks for the info on the youtube channel.  I'll go check it out.  I follow a similar channel for OMV and docker.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

I'm a bit concerned about the license being tied to the USB drive.  That seems a bit odd to me. 

It's pretty much read only to be honest, the whole OS gets unpacked to RAM on boot.   I know it seems weird, but it does work very well.

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5 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

I'm a bit concerned about the license being tied to the USB drive.  That seems a bit odd to me.

 

Thanks for the info on the youtube channel.  I'll go check it out.  I follow a similar channel for OMV and docker.

 

 

I think everyone has had that thought but if you think about it you can move the OS from machine to machine and as stated above if your leaving your NAS up 24/7 then it has less wear than most other OS arrangements out there as it loads up into RAM and then works from there oh and of course you can replace it every year for free

 

If your USB Flash boot device fails, you can transfer your registration key to a new USB Flash device initially at any time, and subsequently up to once per year.

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16 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

I'm a bit concerned about the license being tied to the USB drive.  That seems a bit odd to me.

 

You'll find that the life of a flash drive and the minimal writes that happens on it exceeds the life of any particular hard drive in existence.

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2 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

So I installed my Emby docker last night manually... just found the CA plug-in.  That makes things significantly easier on the Docker front.

 

Are all the apps there just a way to install containers?  

 

I could get lost in there for a bit.

No on;y containers but also Unraid plugins.  

 

The basic idea behind CA is to provide a simple template driven GUI based installation and configuration of plugins and containers to make installing them easy and not too error prone.

Edited by itimpi
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5 minutes ago, GTvert90 said:

Is there a syncthing plugin for unRaid? I suppose I can learn more about Dockers and set something up that way. 

There is a Syncthing docker for unRAID that many here use.  There are lots of dockers and plugins for unRAID that do a variety of useful things. unRAID has a really good Docker implementation.

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2 hours ago, BAlGaInTl said:

So after a couple of days of using unRaid, I'm fairly impressed.

 

I have a bunch of old crappy USB drives laying around, but I would like to get a good one if I switch.

 

Any recommendations?

The main recommendation is to go for a USB2 drive rather than a USB3 one and use a trusted brand.   For some reason USB2 seems to be more reliable during booting and since Unraid runs from RAM once booted you do not need the performance of USB3.   The drive must be 32GB or less in size but anything from about 4GB upwards will do.  It is also a requirement that the USB drive has a unique GUID which is not true of some of the very cheapest brands.    I personally use Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB as being cheap and reliable.

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16 hours ago, itimpi said:

The main recommendation is to go for a USB2 drive rather than a USB3 one and use a trusted brand.   For some reason USB2 seems to be more reliable during booting and since Unraid runs from RAM once booted you do not need the performance of USB3.   The drive must be 32GB or less in size but anything from about 4GB upwards will do.  It is also a requirement that the USB drive has a unique GUID which is not true of some of the very cheapest brands.    I personally use Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB as being cheap and reliable.

 

I found a Sandisk Cruzer Glide 8GB in my drawer that should work nicely.  I don't care that it's bigger, because my MB has an internal USB header, so it will be out of sight.

 

So the next question... I've been evaluating on a sketchy freebie drive that I don't want to use in production.  Should I just request a new "trial" key on the Sandisk when I set up, or transfer the trial key I have now?

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1 hour ago, BAlGaInTl said:

Should I just request a new "trial" key on the Sandisk when I set up, or transfer the trial key I have now?

Depends.

 

If it were me, I'd set up a new trial with the Sandisk, just to make sure the server is happy with that specific key before I committed myself.

 

Downside to that is you will need to set up everything from scratch on the Sandisk. The data on your disks and share names will migrate when you manually assign the disks to the correct slot numbers, the rest of your customizations will need to be set up again, as trial installs do not support direct migration to another trial, for obvious reasons.

 

Now, if you want to risk the easy path, you can license your current trial stick, and once licensed, you can migrate to the Sandisk without losing any settings.

However... by doing this, you will burn your once a year automatic migration, so if the Sandisk has an issue before that year is up, you will be waiting on manual intervention from limetech to get your license moved to yet another stick.

 

Another way to look at it would be to keep using your current freebie drive and license it, and keep super current on downloading and storing the flash drive backups. That way if the stick dies, it's a matter of minutes to be up and running on another stick. You can always test the Sandisk with a temporary trial just to make sure it will be a good candidate for migration if the freebie dies.

 

Unraid isn't very hard on USB sticks, there are plenty of people still using 5+ year old sticks. Limetech is very careful to keep writes on the stick to a bare minimum, and reading is pretty much "free" when it comes to stick lifetime.

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2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Depends.

 

If it were me, I'd set up a new trial with the Sandisk, just to make sure the server is happy with that specific key before I committed myself.

 

Downside to that is you will need to set up everything from scratch on the Sandisk. The data on your disks and share names will migrate when you manually assign the disks to the correct slot numbers, the rest of your customizations will need to be set up again, as trial installs do not support direct migration to another trial, for obvious reasons.

 

Now, if you want to risk the easy path, you can license your current trial stick, and once licensed, you can migrate to the Sandisk without losing any settings.

However... by doing this, you will burn your once a year automatic migration, so if the Sandisk has an issue before that year is up, you will be waiting on manual intervention from limetech to get your license moved to yet another stick.

 

Another way to look at it would be to keep using your current freebie drive and license it, and keep super current on downloading and storing the flash drive backups. That way if the stick dies, it's a matter of minutes to be up and running on another stick. You can always test the Sandisk with a temporary trial just to make sure it will be a good candidate for migration if the freebie dies.

 

Unraid isn't very hard on USB sticks, there are plenty of people still using 5+ year old sticks. Limetech is very careful to keep writes on the stick to a bare minimum, and reading is pretty much "free" when it comes to stick lifetime.

That's what I was thinking. (Setting up a new license on the Sandisk)

 

The unRaid trial I have set up now was just for educational purposes.  None of it is the hardware that I will use in production.  It was just an old celeron SFF box that I had laying around that I stuck a couple of disks on USB to play around with it.  I'm really quite amazed at how well it's working and that I was able to figure it out on my own for the most part.

 

I fully intend on doing everything from scratch on the main hardware.  

 

Thanks to everyone here for the help and insight.

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Want to really have fun during your Trial/Education period? Especially if your using old drives and don't really care.

 

Throw in 3 disks and make sure one of them is a parity drive. Watch a video or something on one of the drives, pause your video and Reach in the case and pull a power cable or Sata cable and watch the system complain about a down drive and still continue to function. lol

 

When I did the above I was watching Expendables and wanted to see how the system would react. Pulled a cable, and then watched some more of the video. Shut everything down and plugged in another drive and turned the system back on. The system saw the new drive and asked if I wanted to rebuild the system. I watched the rest of the video while the system rebuilt the drive.

 

After my little test I removed the 10, 8 and 8 GB drives and knew I had a winner and bought  new drives and went to town on ordering my first build. Still using the same 2GB USB from many years ago. 

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I'll probably be making the switch soon.

 

My hardware is starting to arrive. I have 2 of 3 new 10 TB drives I plan on using to replace my current 5 x 2 TB RAID5 array.

 

The third drive won't be here until next month, but I'm thinking of setting everything up, and adding that drive for parity when it comes.

 

So here's my next question:

 

How forgiving is unRaid for changing hardware? If I set it up on an old MB and CPU I have laying around, is it difficult to move it over to my server grade hardware later? I'm thinking that if I at least get the pool setup, I can transfer all of the data from the old server, and then move the drives.

 

Thoughts?

 

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

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31 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

How forgiving is unRaid for changing hardware? If I set it up on an old MB and CPU I have laying around, is it difficult to move it over to my server grade hardware later?

Very easy, given a few caveats. Unraid identifies drives by the serial number passed through the controller. If either your new or old hardware mangles the serial number in any way, it means you will have to manually tell unraid which drive needs to go to which slot. As long as you stick with plain HBA controllers and don't try to get fancy with RAID controllers, you shouldn't have an issue.

 

Second, if you set up any hardware passthrough for dockers or VM's, when you change that hardware, it's not going to work. That should be obvious, but some people forget about it.

 

The basic NAS part of unraid is very easy to migrate, most times you can just move the boot USB and drives to a new platform and be up and running on the first boot with no changes.

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My Main unraid server is on its build 14.x.x & my other unraid server is on it build 6.x.x, I used multiple motherboards from AMD & Intel with different CPUs & Memory from different generations. I have switched parts & cards around, basically its not windows so I never go a BSOD :)

 

I never had an issue moving the drives from one system to another, lets just say I'm a happy customer.

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19 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

Great.  I was hoping for that.

 

Maybe the last question.... I'll be shucking my 10TB drives.  To get it going, can I set up the two drives in their USB enclosure?  Once I shuck them, will unRaid still recognize them, or will the drive IDs change?

 

 

Depends on the enclosure. USB is not recommended for array members, for multiple reasons, disk id being one. Heat being another, USB enclosures are typically designed for light usage, a parity build or check keeps the drives active 100% for many hours, which will likely overheat the drives if they are in the enclosure. Some enclosures also remap the drive in some way, making the content unreadable once shucked.

 

If you insist on using them via USB, and they are not readable once you shuck them, all is not lost. As long as you have valid parity and the drives stay healthy, you can unshuck and rebuild them directly connected one at a time. Still not recommended though.

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