VM's without an array on an SSD?

[paulmorabi]

Hi,

 

I'm a complete beginner with Unraid but have experience with other similar tools. I've just received my new PC, connected everything and booted into Unraid. All good so far.

 

Currently, I haven't added any disks except for a 1TB SSD that I was planning to use for VM's. I'm planning to shuck some drives once they go on special and in the meantime was going to use Unraid as a VM host only. This is where the problem is. Do I need to put the SSD into the array or is there some other way I can set it up for VM image stoage only?

 

Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks! 

[Squid]

You need to have at least one array disk to use unraid.   Either assign it as disk 1 or assign a separate flash drive as disk1 and the SSD as the cache drive

[paulmorabi]

thanks for the reply. Do you mean even a USB flash drive to begin with?

[JorgeB]

10 hours ago, paulmorabi said:

Do you mean even a USB flash drive to begin with?

Yes, that will do to have one array device.

[paulmorabi]

Thank you! Really appreciated.

[TecEgg]

I know this post was a while ago, but I have a similar question.

 

My VMs are currently stored on the cache and periodically moved to the array via mover. Now it bothers me that as long as the data has been moved I have to make the huge performance losses. Also, every time I look up something in a VM, the HDD starts up again. So the question, can I use a separate SSD (no cache, no array) as the main directory for the VM, and optionally the appdata folder for Docker containers, so that this is always preserved, and the mover mirrors the data with the array and this SSD? 

 

So access is via the SSD every time and the array is used as cold storage?

 

[Squid]

What you want to do is either make a multi-device cache pool so that there's redundancy without any performance loss, or backup the vdisks periodically.