Passing through 10TB disk to Virtualbox Unraid VM

[simt]

Hi all,

I'm running Unraid as a vm in VirtualBox on top of an Ubuntu host. Unraid however is not liking the raw 10TB disk being passed to it by Virtualbox. Both Virtualbox and Unraid are giving me warnings about the disk. I'm asking in the Virtualbox forums, but also thought I'd ask here in case someone might know a workaround.

 

Vbox warning warning message is:

The medium '/home/home/VirtualBox VMs/unraid_home/First_10TB.vmdk' has a logical size of 9TB but the file system the medium is located on can only handle files up to 7TB in theory.
We strongly recommend to put all your virtual disk images and the snapshot folder onto a proper file system (e.g. ext3) with a sufficient size.

Error ID: FatPartitionDetected
Severity: Warning

 

This is a 10TB disk that had already been formatted by a bare metal host Unraid earlier with a single XFS partition. I'm pointing to the raw disk with a VMDK file that's given to Vbox.

The disk status in Unraid is:

 

VBOX_HARDDISK_VBf91b0b21-d343ebca - 10 TB (sdc)
Name:     Disk 1
Partition size:    9,766,436,764 KB (K=1024)
Partition format:    unknown
File system status:    Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout
File system type:    auto (greyed out)

 

Any ideas on how I could fix this from Unraid's end? For anyone who's curious I've attached the VMDK file as a text file. Let me know if there's any other logs that might be useful for diagnosing.

 

p.s. Why Unraid as a VM? -Because I'd like to use my little machine (Asrock J4105) as both a Unraid server and a media player. However after much trying I couldn't get Unraid to successfully pass through the integrated Intel UHD600 video to whatever VM I ran in Unraid. So now I'm trying the other way around.

 

'regards,
Simt

First_10TB.vmdk

[uldise]

what command are you using to create this VMDK?

i just looked at it:

 

# Extent description
RW 19532873631 FLAT "/dev/sda1" 0

 

are you sure "/dev/sda1" is a correct? i would try with "/dev/sda" to access whole drive..

[testdasi]

I would say you should look for an alternative way instead of virtualising Unraid under VirtualBox.

Last I tried, network and IO speed by VB was unusable. Adding all the restrictions e.g. vdisk sizes and it's just not worth it to put in the effort.

[simt]

On 3/15/2020 at 3:42 AM, uldise said:

what command are you using to create this VMDK?

i just looked at it:

 

# Extent description
RW 19532873631 FLAT "/dev/sda1" 0

 

are you sure "/dev/sda1" is a correct? i would try with "/dev/sda" to access whole drive..

Hi uldise,

That worked like a charm. Pointed to 'sda' rather than 'sda1', and now Unraid happily recognises and mounts the disk. Thankyou.

 

On 3/15/2020 at 4:08 AM, testdasi said:

I would say you should look for an alternative way instead of virtualising Unraid under VirtualBox.

Last I tried, network and IO speed by VB was unusable. Adding all the restrictions e.g. vdisk sizes and it's just not worth it to put in the effort.

I do feel what your saying. I really would have preferred to have Unraid as the host 'bare metal' OS and a VM of whatever running to play media. But I spent 'a lot' of hours trying to passthrough the onboard UHD605 graphics to get non-choppy playback. I might go ask for some help in a relevant Unraid thread on that issue.

For now, I'll try out Unraid as a guest in Virtualbox, see what issues pop up (I already don't like that I can't get SMART data for the disks) and if performance is sufficient or not. If it is all okay, great! Otherwise I'll bite the bullet and buy a little raspberry Pi4 or similar to be the media player. I just so wanted to do it all in a single low-power box. (Currently with 2 hdd + 1 sdd, when I'm playing a mkv - TPD: 23W. Idle: ~10W)

 

simt

[SpaceInvaderOne]

If running on Ubuntu. Why not use kvm/qemu and install with vitmanager. I think this would be much easier espically if you can put the Unraid disks on a separate controller card in the Ubuntu host and passthat through to the Unraid guest.