Hey folks,

 

Using Unraid as my ESX Datastore currently after having migrated over from Openfiler and things are chugging along nicely, and had a couple of questions.  I would ideally like to have 2 network interfaces, 1 for regular unraid media traffic (music, movies etc etc) and 1 interface dedicated solely for my nfs disk shares that I have my VMs on... is this possible at all?

 

And, Is there a possibility of having 2 parity drives?  I would like to be able to assign 1 parity drive to the disks hosting my media files and 1 parity drive to the disks hosting my VMs...

 

And expanding that a bit, I know there's an exclude/include disks option for user shares, can that be applied to the cache drive as well? (ie, I want the read/writes to my disk1/disk2 shares to be parity protected immediately and my regular shares to be cached)

 

Yes I know it sounds like I just want 2 seperate unraid boxes, but I just finished consolidating an openfiler, unraid and freenas boxes into 1 super unraid box.

 

 

Thanks

Were you using OpenFiler as a NAS for ESX?  I use OpenFiler as a fiber channel SAN for my ESX boxes and I get MUCH better performance than I did using unRAID via NFS.

Were you using OpenFiler as a NAS for ESX?  I use OpenFiler as a fiber channel SAN for my ESX boxes and I get MUCH better performance than I did using unRAID via NFS.

 

Yes I was using openfiler as a nas for esx instead of FC san since I don't have a fabric switch yet for my hbas

I would ideally like to have 2 network interfaces, 1 for regular unraid media traffic (music, movies etc etc) and 1 interface dedicated solely for my nfs disk shares that I have my VMs on... is this possible at all?

No, unRAID can only use one NIC (as far as I know).  Don't worry, though - at this point in time the NIC is not a bottleneck (in most cases).  It is only in stripped RAID systems that teamed NICs are helpful.

 

And, Is there a possibility of having 2 parity drives?  I would like to be able to assign 1 parity drive to the disks hosting my media files and 1 parity drive to the disks hosting my VMs...

No, this currently isn't possible.  You are essentially asking for two arrays in one box (which is different than having dual parity disks a la RAID 6).  It may be possible to work some magic with VMs (running two side-by-side unRAID arrays in separate VMs), but I kind of doubt it would work.  I don't know if it has been tried or not. 

 

Not as elegant of a solution, but you could always have two arrays in the same box (with one flash drive dedicated to each) and just selectively boot into one or the other (depending on which flash drive you boot from).  However, I don't think you'll be able to run both at once.

 

And expanding that a bit, I know there's an exclude/include disks option for user shares, can that be applied to the cache drive as well? (ie, I want the read/writes to my disk1/disk2 shares to be parity protected immediately and my regular shares to be cached)

Yes, this is actually the default unRAID behavior.  Disk shares (disk1, disk2, etc.) never use the cache drive.  User shares (movies, music, etc.) will use the cache drive if you tell them to (set the cache enabled option to 'yes' on the 'shares' page).  So you can have certain mission critical user shares (i.e. Backup) that don't use the cache drive, and other less important shares (movies, music, etc) that do.