Hi,

 

I want to evaluate UnRaid in a virtual environment, and my very first attempt fails:

When I start it up in GUI mode and login as root, Firefox would open by default with localhost as address. That sounds reasonable so far. However, it can't load the page as it says "Unable to connect". I figure that somehow internal services are not running, but how is that possible after a boot from the original usb stick, what can I do to find out what's going on?

 

 

Ah. VBox. Haven't discussed this one here for awhile.

Can you share some context - (a) how did you boot from the USB stick? Is it via createrawvmdk or using the external USB boot tool? (b) Your network interface - is it connected? Bridged or NATted?

 

At any rate, as a starting point, can you boot in normal mode (not GUI), login as root from the command prompt, and share the results of:

ip link

ip addr

 

It was a hassle to even get to that point, so I consider making a proposal to the maintainers to offer a virtual harddisk file in parallel to the USB version, but that's another topic.

 

Ok, here some details: 

I'm running VirtualBox on a MacOS Catalina on a Ryzen CPU, AMV-V enabled. I downloaded the Unraid files for manual USB stick creation, copied them on a USB stick as described and ran the make bootable script. After that, I had to go to my Windows installation to create an unraid.vhd file with Winimage from that stick.

I confirmed btw that the physical boot stick was directly bootable on my machine (although it stuck somewhere in the boot process, but I didn't pursue that issue any further, I just mention it here for completeness as there may be a chance that the stick was not created properly).

 

Back in MacOS, I attached the vhd file. Network is configured as Network Bridge, promiskuous mode for both guest and host enabled (but I had tried with the default NAT at first).

 

I attached screenshots of the commands you suggested (I found way to copy the content of the VBox window as text rather than as screenshot?) 

Thanks for clarifying.

Short answer first: What you need to do is to attach the actual USB stick to your VM (you can leave the VHD to be booted from, but make sure the actual stick is available to the VM).

 

Longer answer: Unraid OS is built in such a way that the stage-1 boot does not see HDDs, but does see USB-attached sticks. Drivers required for the subsequent stages can be loaded from the USB stick. If the USB stick is not available, those drives will not be loaded, and, among other things, the network will not be accessible.

After a few hours trying I have to say that virtualizing Unraid has been a pretty bad experience so far that I haven't seen with competitors. Connecting a USB stick to VBox is a major undertaking (I can give more details if wanted).

 

So I managed to accomplish what you proposed and I'm able to connect to Unraid, but it says that my USB stick is blacklisted, so when I try to start the array consisting of one single disk, it says "too many devices". Without the array running I can't try any of the other features like docker or plugins etc.

 

2 hours ago, kana said:

After a few hours trying I have to say that virtualizing Unraid has been a pretty bad experience so far that I haven't seen with competitors. Connecting a USB stick to VBox is a major undertaking (I can give more details if wanted).

 

So I managed to accomplish what you proposed and I'm able to connect to Unraid, but it says that my USB stick is blacklisted, so when I try to start the array consisting of one single disk, it says "too many devices". Without the array running I can't try any of the other features like docker or plugins etc.

 

 

That means that the USB stick does not have a unique GUID, and it needs to have a unique GUID to meet Unraid's licencing requirements. 

13 hours ago, kana said:

After a few hours trying I have to say that virtualizing Unraid has been a pretty bad experience so far that I haven't seen with competitors

Try VMWare or Proxmox, a have experience with both, works as expected.

6 hours ago, uldise said:

Try VMWare or Proxmox, a have experience with both, works as expected.

I have experience with Virtualbox too - works pretty much the same way. For evaluation it should be similar.

The two issues so far: (a) USB stick not attached to the VM and (b) USB stick blacklisted, are unrelated to the type of hypervisor and would have happened with any of them.