Unraid on ESXi - Best practice

[Flemming]

I think I am going to move my UnRAID to my ESXi because the i3 CPU in my UnRAID us just to slow for some of the containers (Nextcloud)

First plan vas to just run all VM's in UnRAID, but I think it might be better to just run it under ESXi?

In that case, what will be the best  practice method to set this up? I guess I should passrough a PCI-E SATA-controller for the drives, but what about the UnRAID OS?

 

How can I make ESXi boot from that, or is it in any way possible to generate a valid virtual drive? 

And how to store VM's? I guess it will be a bad idea to store them on the UnRAID array if it is a VM.

(Also, I don't like the hardware-associated license model..)

[doron]

Please read previous posts on this forum, you can glean a lot of pros and cons for running Unraid virtualized.

I've been doing it for quite a few years and I'm happy.

On 10/6/2020 at 9:38 AM, Flemming said:

I guess I should passrough a PCI-E SATA-controller for the drives, but what about the UnRAID OS?

 

How can I make ESXi boot from that, or is it in any way possible to generate a valid virtual drive? 

If your ESXi is 7.0, it can boot directly from USB - just attach the USB to the VM and you should be good to go.

 

If your ESXi version is lower than 7.0, there are multiple ways of booting - my preference is PlopKexec. Again, read more on this forum section.

On 10/6/2020 at 9:38 AM, Flemming said:

And how to store VM's? I guess it will be a bad idea to store them on the UnRAID array if it is a VM.

There are pros and cons. If it's a long-running VM, it would mean that the array drives would spin 24x7 and not be spun down. This has bearing on energy consumption and more.

That said, if you have a reasonably large SSD pool as cache, you can configure a share that will be cache-only and will store VMs. This will not write to mechanical drives. On the flip side will not be inherently protected, but you can probably back them up to your array.

So no clear yes or no - it's a matter of design.