Stupid Questions About Virtualisation on Proxmox


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Due to seeing a good price on Xeon processor I'm doing a mini upgrade on my Gen 8 HP Microserver which has rekindled some interest in playing with a home lab. I've been running unRaid bare metal, but haven't really used it to it's fullest extent. 

 

Now that I have a VT-D happy processor I'm considering Proxmox for bare metal and running unRaid as VM to act as a NAS mainly. 

 

Stupid questions...

 

1) I was thinking of using the on board controller (B120i) to run a pair of raided SSDs to install Proxmox OS onto and store VM images while using a stand alone PCI card to pass through the 4 HDD bay and probably another SSD to unRaid. Is this a sensible approach? 

2) What sort of resources should I assign to the unRaid VM if it's mainly to be used as a NAS and related dockers? 

3) Should I actually run the dockers in unRaid or in another VM? I'll be spinning up at least a Linux flavour server to run some other services. 

4) If I like Proxmox enough to want to play seriously, and invest in a better box (the Gen 8 16GB max RAM is a killer), how hard would it be to move unRaid back to bare metal assuming I'd probably but back in the lower TDP processor to run more efficiently as a straight up NAS but would lose VT-D. 

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17 minutes ago, SteelCityColt said:

1) I was thinking of using the on board controller (B120i) to run a pair of raided SSDs to install Proxmox OS onto and store VM images while using a stand alone PCI card to pass through the 4 HDD bay and probably another SSD to unRaid. Is this a sensible approach? 

2) What sort of resources should I assign to the unRaid VM if it's mainly to be used as a NAS and related dockers? 

3) Should I actually run the dockers in unRaid or in another VM? I'll be spinning up at least a Linux flavour server to run some other services. 

4) If I like Proxmox enough to want to play seriously, and invest in a better box (the Gen 8 16GB max RAM is a killer), how hard would it be to move unRaid back to bare metal assuming I'd probably but back in the lower TDP processor to run more efficiently as a straight up NAS but would lose VT-D. 

1) whether it's sensible or not depends on your tech skill. However, why would you want to run Unraid as a VM under Proxmox when Unraid itself has VM functionality? any particular Proxmox-only thing that you are after?

If storage pooling is all that you need, you may not even need Proxmox but any Linux distro + Snapraid + Mergerfs.

 

2) From my own experience, 4GB RAM, 2 cores and not much more, unless you run encryption and/or dual parity, then you need more processing power.

 

3) It depends on whether Unraid has the dockers you want or not. The benefit is Unraid makes it super easy to use dockers but if you can set it up manually, it doesn't quite matter.

 

4) Super easy. Unplug drive and stick from old machine, plug them into new machine, boot, done.

That is assuming HBA doesn't do funky truncation of disk serial numbers. If that's the case, you just need to make sure you reassign your drives manually correctly but everything else should just work.

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2 minutes ago, testdasi said:

1) whether it's sensible or not depends on your tech skill. However, why would you want to run Unraid as a VM under Proxmox when Unraid itself has VM functionality? any particular Proxmox-only thing that you are after?

If storage pooling is all that you need, you may not even need Proxmox but any Linux distro + Snapraid + Mergerfs.

 

2) From my own experience, 4GB RAM, 2 cores and not much more, unless you run encryption and/or dual parity, then you need more processing power.

 

3) It depends on whether Unraid has the dockers you want or not. The benefit is Unraid makes it super easy to use dockers but if you can set it up manually, it doesn't quite matter.

 

4) Super easy. Unplug drive and stick from old machine, plug them into new machine, boot, done.

That is assuming HBA doesn't do funky truncation of disk serial numbers. If that's the case, you just need to make sure you reassign your drives manually correctly but everything else should just work.


Thanks for the quick reply!

 

1) Mainly to play with Proxmox as an "enterprise" hypervisor and see what differences there are, but I'd still need some form of NAS solution (although I know it's not best practice to house on the same box) and the issue with ZFS/FreeNAS that unRaid solves is being able to add drives as you go. As for my tech skill... lacking, but I guess that's why I want to give it a go. 

 

4) So in theory if I removed the Proxmox SSDs, and booted bare metal from the USB rather than booting off it in VM I'd be back to status quo? 

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7 minutes ago, SteelCityColt said:

4) So in theory if I removed the Proxmox SSDs, and booted bare metal from the USB rather than booting off it in VM I'd be back to status quo? 

Not only in theory but also in practice.

You don't even need to remove the Proxmox SSDs, just change boot order in BIOS.

(implicit assumption: your PCIe SATA card works with Unraid).

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3 hours ago, SteelCityColt said:

Due to seeing a good price on Xeon processor I'm doing a mini upgrade on my Gen 8 HP Microserver which has rekindled some interest in playing with a home lab. I've been running unRaid bare metal, but haven't really used it to it's fullest extent. 

 

Now that I have a VT-D happy processor I'm considering Proxmox for bare metal and running unRaid as VM to act as a NAS mainly. 

 

Can it be done, yes but I'd recommend against it.

 

This is what I did up until this year. I had unRaid running as a VM (4 vCores, 8 G RAM) in ESXi with a H310 in IT mode passed through. It ran fine. But I found the extra virtualization layer on top added to the complexity and of course the system requirements. Had about 15 VMs, including a FreeNAS VM. unRaid's need to boot from a USB (ESXi does not support booting from USB) added to the complexity. Not sure if Proxmox allows a VM to boot from USB, as I've never used it.

 

If you want both, run unRaid in a separate lower powered box, pretty much anything will work if you don't need VMs on unRaid. And run Proxmox on it's own more powerful box. You'll be much happier when you down bring down everything for a simple hardware change. This was a concern for me as I have a number of users of my PLEX server. Plus it took quite awhile to bring everything back up. FreeNAS was feeding ESXi two iSCSI drives for some VMs. Getting these to come up on their own never worked reliably. 

 

That being said, I just run unRaid now, with a few VMs and a lot of dockers. I do miss some of the functionality of ESXi (using veeam to backup VMs) but for the most part I'm happy BMing unRaid. 

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7 minutes ago, uldise said:

no problem at all - just download plopKExec iso (https://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec/download.html), add it to Esxi VM, and you are done - Esxi VM boots from plopKExec ISO, then it automatically select unraid USB stick and continue to boot.

 

Yep, that is what I did. Looks like my old setup was very similar to yours (dual Xeon E5-2665 8x16GB ECC). Even using a very similar case. 

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