UNRAID under Proxmox


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Hi,

 

Recently I have been thinking of building a UNRAID box. As I was talking to someone, he introduced me to Proxmox (as I was trying to build a Nethserver, told me I could probably think of putting that inside Proxmox, would be easy to clone it, make backups, bring it back if something goes wrong, etc). I was wondering. How easy is it to run UNRAID under Proxmox? Supposed this is something that can be done, I'm worried about performance.

 

The machine I'm thinking to build is like this :

 

AMD Ryzen 2700X or 3700X

64 gigs of ECC RAM

4 x 3 Tb Drives for Proxmox in Raid10 using the motherboards SATA ports (to run VMs)

LSI SAS9200-8i in TI-MODE to service (to begin with) 4 x 6 Tb WD RED NAS drives

ASUS X470 Crosshair VII Hero (Already had the board)

1 x Realktek 10 Gb ethernet card dedicated to 

1 x QuadroPro video card (for PLEX)

 

The video card would be using one of the PCI-E 8X slot. The other PCI-E 8X would be used by the LSI card and that leaves the PCI-E 4X for the 10 Gb NIC Card. Now I know, if I do this, that means my 10Gb will not be running to its full potential. The reason for the video card in there is to do some 4K transcoding with the PLEX.

 

But I'm not sure I will be doing that. Perhaps I'm better off building a dedicated PLEX box instead.

 

Anyways, if any of you tried to run UNRAID inside Proxmox, did it work well? Also feel free to constructively criticize the build I was thinking of doing.

 

Thanks

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9 hours ago, JonMikelV said:

If you're planning to play with Unraid under Proxmox that should be fine but I wouldn't recommend it for long term use.

 

I know little of Proxmox but I would guess that Unraid wouldn't have the right kind of drive access to safely "do it's thing" if running in a Proxmox VM.

Understood. I do agree, they both server different purposes, and it would be like asking my NAS system to provide access to services it shouldn't really be providing in the first place. I do know UNRAID supports VMs and Docker but, it is like turning something a specialist into a generalist. Not ideal.

 

thanks for the recommendation! Much appreciated!

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13 hours ago, tessierp said:

Anyways, if any of you tried to run UNRAID inside Proxmox, did it work well?

i'm migrated from ESXi to Proxmox about a month ago. Regarding unraid, all working as expected as it was on ESXi too.

 

10 hours ago, JonMikelV said:

If you're planning to play with Unraid under Proxmox that should be fine but I wouldn't recommend it for long term use.

 

I know little of Proxmox but I would guess that Unraid wouldn't have the right kind of drive access to safely "do it's thing" if running in a Proxmox VM.

if you don't know, why you recommend then? what do you mean with "the right kind of drive access to safely "do it's thing""?

looks like some bullshit..., sorry.

 

Yes, unraid is no supported to run under VM, nor ESXi nor Proxmox. but many of us are running it on VMs just fine.

 

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1 minute ago, uldise said:

i'm migrated from ESXi to Proxmox about a month ago. Regarding unraid, all working as expected as it was on ESXi too.

 

if you don't know, why you recommend then? what do you mean with "the right kind of drive access to safely "do it's thing""?

looks like some bullshit..., sorry.

 

Yes, unraid is no supported to run under VM, nor ESXi nor Proxmox. but many of us are running it on VMs just fine.

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for your reply. Glad to hear you are able to run UNRAID as a VM. I'm sorry but I have to ask. Even though you can, if you had the choice, would you really run UNRAID as a VM or have a dedicated system? What made you decide to run UNRAID as a VM?

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2 minutes ago, tessierp said:

What made you decide to run UNRAID as a VM?

i'm long time unraid user, and started using unraid when there was no option to run VMs on unraid itself. and for me, running simple unraid on one hardware looks like wasting hardware resource(see my sig for hardware details). so i started with ESXi, and my server was running for years on that configuration without any problems. if i would start know, i will consider an option to run unraid bare-metal and run another VMs on it. but for me ESXi looks more stable system over this years - you setup it and forget about it - it's very stable and can run for months without single restart. apart for unraid on bare-metal - if you need to change unraid version for example, then you restart you unraid and all VMs on it.

i moved to Proxmox cos i wanted to try cluster with two servers - ESXi clustering are only on paid version only.

 

if you have further questions, feel free to ask. 

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26 minutes ago, uldise said:

i'm long time unraid user, and started using unraid when there was no option to run VMs on unraid itself. and for me, running simple unraid on one hardware looks like wasting hardware resource(see my sig for hardware details). so i started with ESXi, and my server was running for years on that configuration without any problems. if i would start know, i will consider an option to run unraid bare-metal and run another VMs on it. but for me ESXi looks more stable system over this years - you setup it and forget about it - it's very stable and can run for months without single restart. apart for unraid on bare-metal - if you need to change unraid version for example, then you restart you unraid and all VMs on it.

i moved to Proxmox cos i wanted to try cluster with two servers - ESXi clustering are only on paid version only.

 

if you have further questions, feel free to ask. 

I see. Interesting. I also understand why you said a waste of resources, considering the motherboard you use, dual CPU. Depending on the CPU however, it is best to split them up. But then I would be wasting space and money on another case. And performance wise you had no issue with UNRAID running as a VM under Proxmox?.

 

From my original specs, I modified it to look like this

 

AMD Ryzen 3700

64 gigs of ECC RAM

4 x 3 Tb Drives for Proxmox in Raid10 using the motherboards SATA ports (to run VMs)

LSI SAS9200-8i in TI-MODE to service (to begin with) 4 x 6 Tb WD RED NAS drives

ASUS X470 Crosshair VII Hero (Already had the board)

2 x Realtek 1 Gb ethernet (I would dedicate 1 to UNRAID, the other to PROXMOX)

 

Talking about NICs, did you assign a specific ethernet card to you UNRAID? Also, seeing that you have a server board with 2 CPU sockets and your core assignments, perhaps a 3700X wouldn't be enough and should get a3950X. It is that I was considering assigning only 4 cores to UNRAID, leaving 4 to do whatever, assigning 1 to PROXMOX and that leaves 3 for VMs.

 

I originally was planning to install PLEX as a VM but.. I think I'll just get a Raspberry 4 with 4 gigs of RAM for that. That is why I removed the video card, it was overkill and not needed. I would replace that 8X PCI-e with a 10 Gbit card eventually.

Edited by tessierp
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18 minutes ago, tessierp said:

And performance wise you had no issue with UNRAID running as a VM under Proxmox?

in my case i don't see any performance decrease - i'm running unraid as pure nas + some dockers, including Nextcloud, Plex, duplicati..

 

20 minutes ago, tessierp said:

4 x 3 Tb Drives for Proxmox in Raid10 using the motherboards SATA ports (to run VMs)

i have no experience with AMD at all, but should work just fine. for VMs i prefer SSD, and in my newest server PCIe NVME drives, and i don't use any RAID, insteed i do regular backups for my other than unrad VMs to unraid over NFS.

24 minutes ago, tessierp said:

Talking about NICs, did you assign a specific ethernet card to you UNRAID? 

 No, i have 10Gbit nics and 1Gbit nics in my servers and i'm using them in Active-backup bond mode on host side. all my VMs have virtual nics only and thats working just fine.

 

26 minutes ago, tessierp said:

It is that I was considering assigning only 4 cores to UNRAID, leaving 4 to do whatever, assigning 1 to PROXMOX and that leaves 3 for VMs.

if you go Proxmox or ESXi, you can assign more cores to VMs than you have total Cores available on server. just watch for usage - i think, your will never run at full speed all of your VMs at once. i have a 8 Core CPU with HT enabled, so host OS sees them as 16 CPUs.

 

29 minutes ago, tessierp said:

I originally was planning to install PLEX as a VM but..

you don't need a GPU at all to run Plex, just avoid any transcoding. i'm running Plex as Docker on unraid VM and it runs just fine - i assigned max 6 of 8 CPU to Plex docker to not overload unraid VM itself, if in same case plex would start some transcoding. but i don't have any 4K content, 1080p/720p only, so i can do some transcodes to lower settings in CPU without problem.

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28 minutes ago, uldise said:

in my case i don't see any performance decrease - i'm running unraid as pure nas + some dockers, including Nextcloud, Plex, duplicati..

 

i have no experience with AMD at all, but should work just fine. for VMs i prefer SSD, and in my newest server PCIe NVME drives, and i don't use any RAID, insteed i do regular backups for my other than unrad VMs to unraid over NFS.

 No, i have 10Gbit nics and 1Gbit nics in my servers and i'm using them in Active-backup bond mode on host side. all my VMs have virtual nics only and thats working just fine.

 

if you go Proxmox or ESXi, you can assign more cores to VMs than you have total Cores available on server. just watch for usage - i think, your will never run at full speed all of your VMs at once. i have a 8 Core CPU with HT enabled, so host OS sees them as 16 CPUs.

 

you don't need a GPU at all to run Plex, just avoid any transcoding. i'm running Plex as Docker on unraid VM and it runs just fine - i assigned max 6 of 8 CPU to Plex docker to not overload unraid VM itself, if in same case plex would start some transcoding. but i don't have any 4K content, 1080p/720p only, so i can do some transcodes to lower settings in CPU without problem.

Excellent all great information, thank you so much. I'm still considering the hardware I'll go with. I might go with dual EPYC Rome CPUs if I want something more serious. But then, that is not cheap right now.

 

Is there some good documentation somewhere that is easy to follow to install UNRAID as a VM under Proxmox? I am new to both Proxmox and UNRAID.

 

Thanks again.

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4 minutes ago, tessierp said:

Is there some good documentation somewhere that is easy to follow to install UNRAID as a VM under Proxmox?

see here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/82260-virtualizing-unraid-on-proxmox-604/

the biggest problem would be boot from USB - i'm still using plopKexec method and it works just fine.

 

but for proxmox host: this looks very promising and detailed:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-beginner-tutorial-how-to-set-up-your-first-virtual-machine-on-a-secondary-hard-disk.59559/

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47 minutes ago, uldise said:

see here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/82260-virtualizing-unraid-on-proxmox-604/

the biggest problem would be boot from USB - i'm still using plopKexec method and it works just fine.

 

but for proxmox host: this looks very promising and detailed:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-beginner-tutorial-how-to-set-up-your-first-virtual-machine-on-a-secondary-hard-disk.59559/

Thanks again for all the help, that was very helpful!

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12 hours ago, uldise said:

If you don't know, why you recommend then? what do you mean with "the right kind of drive access to safely "do it's thing""?

looks like some bullshit..., sorry.

 

Yes, unraid is no supported to run under VM, nor ESXi nor Proxmox. but many of us are running it on VMs just fine.

 

Why the bashing?

 

Just because I don't know Proxmox doesn't mean I don't know VMs.  (Plus you confirmed it's not supported - seems a solid suggestion to me.)

 

One person's "bullshit" is another's avoidance of technical details about drive exposure until sure the audience is ready for it.

 

You shouldn't feel the need to apologise for your opinion, it's just as valid as anybody else's!  Plus, thanks to you I know more about Proxmox use that I did before.  🙂

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On 4/17/2020 at 12:32 AM, JonMikelV said:

Why the bashing?

 

Just because I don't know Proxmox doesn't mean I don't know VMs.  (Plus you confirmed it's not supported - seems a solid suggestion to me.)

 

One person's "bullshit" is another's avoidance of technical details about drive exposure until sure the audience is ready for it.

 

You shouldn't feel the need to apologise for your opinion, it's just as valid as anybody else's!  Plus, thanks to you I know more about Proxmox use that I did before.  🙂

Like you also said it is not supported officially but it does not mean you can't do it. The real question is, even if you can make it work, should you? I still feel like separating concerns is better. A NAS is a system dedicated to storage on its own it is a big task involving specific hardware for a specific task. One would argue that often that is what you do with VMs but you use resources available from a pool, you don't need to dedicate stuff like HDDs, LSI controllers, etc. And if I would install UNRAID under PROXMOX that is would I would do or think I should do anyways. At the same time, like ULDISE said, unless you use the full potential of a build you could find yourself wasting resources but I guess that is only true if you put too much or don't monitor the situation and adjust..

 

I would be careful with opinions. Many people tend to have an "opinion" that is often not based around facts and you can't really argue with an opinion. It would be like saying "why do you like blue, blue sucks, red is better". It is an opinion, a preference. Some opinions are valid, some are not and only through research like we do with science can we separate an opinion from a fact.

 

I'm a Software Developer, and I'm used to separate things by concerns, not to mix everything together and there is a good reason for that. When you start mixing everything together and you need to change something it can lead to chaos and problems. It limits your ability to refactor, make changes, add, remove features appropriately. So while I do understand the notion of efficiency and not wasting resources like ULDISE, I am also wondering if for something like a storage system like UNRAID if I should mix that with Proxmox. I've been reading on Proxmox and it is an amazing Hypervisor, basically offers same level of features you would have with ESXi or a HYPER-V Server, except for home use it is totally free. With Proxmox you could create a lab where you'd deploy services, micro-services, test ideas with different OSes, etc. Amazing. But should I mix that with a storage system. Lets not forget that all this will generate heat as well. Anyways just food for thought I guess. Perhaps certain things are better to live in separate environments? There is another added advantage of having UNRAID as a VM. With Proxmox you could backup your environment and restore it very easy. Although maybe that is not true because I think UNRAID starts off from a USB key right? If that is true, I could take all hardware I use in a UNRAID box, move it somewhere else, and get up and running really fast if all the configs sit in a USB key and most of UNRAID runs in memory.

 

I wonder, what would they do in the enterprise? Would they put a storage server inside a VM? Not that the enterprise should be the defacto model to follow but I'm just wondering.

 

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20 minutes ago, tessierp said:

With Proxmox you could backup your environment and restore it very easy. Although maybe that is not true because I think UNRAID starts off from a USB key right? If that is true, I could take all hardware I use in a UNRAID box, move it somewhere else, and get up and running really fast if all the configs sit in a USB key and most of UNRAID runs in memory.

you can do this on same hardware - if you decide to go bare-metal, just reboot your host, assign unraid USB flash drive as boot device and it should just work.

and for backups - proxmox backup system will help a very little to unraid - you simply backup proxmox VM config, so you should set unraid usb flash backup and also setup another system for unraid data backup - full or partial, it depends.

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4 minutes ago, uldise said:

you can do this on same hardware - if you decide to go bare-metal, just reboot your host, assign unraid USB flash drive as boot device and it should just work.

and for backups - proxmox backup system will help a very little to unraid - you simply backup proxmox VM config, so you should set unraid usb flash backup and also setup another system for unraid data backup - full or partial, it depends.

Interesting and makes sense. I could use the USB key, boot UNRAID only or boot Proxmox. It sure does give me some flexibility. I could setup UNRAID first, see how it works. And then I could install Proxmox on a SSD, set everything up to for UNRAID inside Proxmox and see how that goes. Seems flexible enough. Thanks for the tip.

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3 hours ago, uldise said:

yes, it should work best, if your unraid drives are on separate controller. if you use motherboard ports, then there will be a problem to identify drives in proxmox VM.

Very true, that is what I was getting at with separation of concerns, a Software Development habit. If I would put both these in the same box, the idea would be to use a LSI controller converted to IT MODE, something like a LSI SAS9200-8i. I also intend to use SSDs to put my VMs on anyways so it would be very ideally to identify them, putting everything in the new Fractal Design Define 7 XL, plenty of space!

Edited by tessierp
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