Running UnRaid in virtualbox for testing

[plissje]

Hi guys,

So I want to try out UnRaid as I've been a long time FreeNAS user at home. As I don't have any spare machines at the moment, I wanted to try it out as a VM in my VirtualBox.

So I managed to find some old guides regarding this (USB converted to VHD and booted from that) but even though the system boots, It seems it doesn't fully work. I don't have any networking and the GUI just doesn't start.

 

Are there any updated guides or this or steps that I missed?

 

Thanks!

[itimpi]

You have to pass an Unraid USB drive (with a licence file on it) through to complete the Unraid boot process.  Unraid looks for the USB drive after the Linux kernel has loaded as that is where network drivers and configuration information are loaded from.

[ich777]

5 hours ago, plissje said:

As I don't have any spare machines at the moment, I wanted to try it out as a VM in my VirtualBox.

Have you not one machine that can act for the moment as a Unraid server?

Since it is booting from the USB stick and loads itself into RAM it will work also on a completely setup machine and don't touches any configuration (keep in mind that you need at least a hard drive - external usb hard disk works too).

 

But keep in mind if you try it this way to pay attention which drive you assign and format...

You need at least one drive in the array to start it.

[Joly0]

On 10/14/2020 at 9:12 AM, plissje said:

Hi guys,

So I want to try out UnRaid as I've been a long time FreeNAS user at home. As I don't have any spare machines at the moment, I wanted to try it out as a VM in my VirtualBox.

So I managed to find some old guides regarding this (USB converted to VHD and booted from that) but even though the system boots, It seems it doesn't fully work. I don't have any networking and the GUI just doesn't start.

 

Are there any updated guides or this or steps that I missed?

 

Thanks!

Have you figured out how to get network access? I am trying to test unraid in a virtualbox or vmware vm aswell. It boots, but its giving me an ip- adress outside of my host-subnet which i cant access from my host.

[bar1]

Hey everyone... Bumping this... Any luck?

[dap]

This worked for me:

- VirtualBox > edit VM settings to enable EFI

- use a USB 2.0 memory stick and plug into a USB2 hub, plug that into MacBook Pro USB C port

- add that USB stick to the VM using EHCI (USB 2)

- Boot VM, it will fall back to the virtualbox EFI shell.

- Let startup script auto run. Run this:

- fs1: (or wherever your usb disk landed)
- cd EFI-\boot
- bootx64.efi

- Lime Technology EFI boot menu should start here and let you select Unraid

 

[unPatrick]

On 6/12/2021 at 9:13 PM, dap said:

This worked for me:

- VirtualBox > edit VM settings to enable EFI

- use a USB 2.0 memory stick and plug into a USB2 hub, plug that into MacBook Pro USB C port

- add that USB stick to the VM using EHCI (USB 2)

- Boot VM, it will fall back to the virtualbox EFI shell.

- Let startup script auto run. Run this:

- fs1: (or wherever your usb disk landed)
- cd EFI-\boot
- bootx64.efi

- Lime Technology EFI boot menu should start here and let you select Unraid

 

 

When trying this, I get the error: "cd: Current directory not speficied"

The disk is GPT - FAT32 formatted (via gparted).
It was added in VirtualBox via USB2.
After typing BLK0, no output is shown (but also no error message).

 

What did I do wrong?

[itimpi]

I believe the Unraid boot device is expected to use MBR partitioning, not GPT.