To Virtualize or take a different path


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Hey all, Bare with me while I slightly ramble.

 

I've been running UnRaid on a miniITX board in a LianLi Q25b case for about 5 years. It's a Pentium3.2ghz build with 8GB DDR3 ram, 3x3TB data, 1x3TB parity and a 120GB SSD for cache. I run a number of dockers, mainly Plex is the biggie, no VMs. I also run an IntelNUC Celeron on Ubuntu for home automation, this is also up 24/7 and runs lots of Dockers like Home-Assistant, Node-REd, Mosquitto, MariaDB etc.

 

The reason I moved all that stuff to an NUC instead of keeping it in UnRaid was because of Parity checks taking it down which wasn't a good WAF.

I'm pretty happy with the setup. I do see plex spiking the CPU, but I mainly just don't like having two places to maintain dockers and the NUC won't run Plex very well. I also need to Update my Router (a Linksys e4200....old!).

 

So I started thinking I could upgrade my UnRaid server, run Proxmox, Virtualize Unraid as a guest and also run my dockers in another VM and even PFSense in another. This would require me to rebuild, get a Fractal Node 8, new MB, new CPU, probably another 8GB ram and a new NIC card. I'm hoping that would be all.

 

What do you guys/gals think of this approach? Would you do it? Is it a big no-no bringing it all together into one. Any alternatives or suggestions? I'm thinking of building it slowly over a few months, so could look out for eBay deals, I'm not after blazing, just enough+.

 

Thanks for any thoughts on the matter.

Christian

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41 minutes ago, niietzshe said:

The reason I moved all that stuff to an NUC instead of keeping it in UnRaid was because of Parity checks taking it down

If you have a well set up box with plenty of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth, you can run all the stuff on unraid and parity checks won't effect the critical stuff. I have a home automation VM and I don't even notice when a parity check is running.

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That’s true,
I’m currently monitoring Plex with tautuli through home assistant to see what’s going on.

To be fair the easiest thing to do is replace my router with an R7800, an Apple TV upstairs to replace the nexus player and hardwire it. Then I probably wouldn’t be transcoding at all.


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13 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

If you have a well set up box with plenty of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth, you can run all the stuff on unraid and parity checks won't effect the critical stuff. I have a home automation VM and I don't even notice when a parity check is running.

If parity checks do cause a problem then you can schedule them to only be run at times when the server would normally be idle.

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If parity checks do cause a problem then you can schedule them to only be run at times when the server would normally be idle.


I normally have to reboot after a parity check (3am). It takes dockers down...

There’s enough power in the NUC for what I need, it stays at 40%. I was just wondering if I should start a new path.


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14 minutes ago, niietzshe said:

I normally have to reboot after a parity check (3am). It takes dockers down...

That's definitely not normal. My monthly parity checks take about 19 hours, and until the last month that I added the pause feature, that's been 19 continuous hours. Never had to reboot.

 

What does 3am have to do with it?

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6 hours ago, niietzshe said:

So I started thinking I could upgrade my UnRaid server, run Proxmox, Virtualize Unraid

I do similar recently, but not upgrade for hardware. I have two baremetel rack and now connect 2nd rack's disks to 1st rack ( 2nd rack be a disk enclosure ). So two Unraid be guest under Proxmox.

 

In fact, current benefit I actually found was all guest could share a 10G NIC and some power saving. This change mainly for future planning, I could combine all disk be one Unraid and add some disks in 2nd rack mainboard area.

 

BTW, I could revert back all easy.

 

6 hours ago, niietzshe said:

Is it a big no-no bringing it all together into one.

I always don't like that.

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