[GUIDE] Installing UnRaid (ver. 6.83) on ProxMox (ver. 6.2-4)


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October 2020
[GUIDE] Installing UnRaid (ver. 6.83) on ProxMox (ver. 6.2-4)

Background; I have been using UnRaid for close to a year, and have just started using ProxMox a few weeks ago. However I have been using other virtualization technologies and hypervisors for years, Hyperconverge (Cisco HyperFlex, Nutanix) and Hypervisors (VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, etc) for years. I wanted to virtualize UnRaid on ProxMox, but found complicated older forum posts, and thought there should be a better way. I experimented and hope I found an easy way to set this up. I just wanted to share to the community.

1. Download the Unraid Server OS and make a USB key. Take notes USB 2.0 is generally better than USB 3.0/3.1 for USB drives used for Unraid. Note, Unraid does not install to a drive, it will only and always boot from the USB drive/key. It installs into memory on each boot, and runs from there.(https://unraid.net/download)

 

2. Make sure to boot the unraid OS on your server without proxmox running, in other words, you can have proxmox installed, but boot from the key once to make sure it is going to work with your hardware. I went through three USB drives, even two of the same type, before I found one that would work! If you have DHCP set up on your network, you should get a DHCP IP address that you recognize from your network. In my case my network is 10.0.0.x. If you get an IP that starts with 169.254, then this generaly means the usb drive is bad, you will probably see some comments above about not finding files. You can also login to unraid via console and try deleting /boot/config/network.cfg and rebooting to see if that fixes it. More than likely it is an incompatible USB drive.
1530940222_2020-10-2414_11_03-VM1000-unraid(1)-RemoteViewer.png.f28f76b380d55ec9dea418cf8d219323.png

 

3. Reboot back into ProxMox

 

4. Make a VM with the following settings
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Memory; UnRaid likes memory, so make sure you give it enough.
Processors; Make sure you go to the bottom of the list of processors and pick the "host" type. This passes through your hosts processor. This will limit you on migrating your UnRaid VM to another host, but you can't do that anyway, since it is linked to your USB drive.

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BIOS; Use SeaBIOS
Display; use the default if you wish. I love SPICE, so that is what I use. If you use spice you have to have the viewer installed on your workstation.
Machine; Default i440fx
SCSI Controller; VirtIO SCSI I tried the others, but this works fine.
CD/DVD Drive; ProxMox will not boot a USB drive in a VM, however you can boot an ISO, and there is an ISO that will boot a USB drive... See where I'm going there? Make your life easy and download plopkexex (https://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec/download.html) extract it and then upload plopkexec64.iso to your ISO share. Then mount that ISO in your VM. Tada no config, and it just works.
1670312006_2020-10-2414_17_55-pve1-ProxmoxVirtualEnvironment.png.6c84920fe1df1f6cae3a70ee8cc4ce83.png
Hard Disk; Make a hard disk or disks for your VM. I really don't recommend that you make several virtual disks and set them up inside of Unraid and make a array, just make one and go with that. You can always make a larger one later and copy your files across to the larger one inside of unraid at a later time if you want to go larger or smaller. Lastly, you can pass through direct hard drives, and other direct USB drives, if you want Unraid to control them directly, then you can setup an array just like you normally would. However if you are doing that, you might as well delete proxmox and set your server up with unraid, as unraid will do VM's and Docker locally.
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Network Device; use e1000. I had problems getting any other virtual NIC to work other than the e1000. You may end up getting no IP for your IP address on UnRaid, or the 169.254 type address. You can also login to unraid via console and try deleting /boot/config/network.cfg and rebooting to see if that fixes it.

158990951_2020-10-2414_17_22-pve1-ProxmoxVirtualEnvironment.png.6bf712a472a96722058b36194994c820.png
USB Device; You must pass through the USB Device that your Unraid is installed on, if you do it this way, and not the other way of copying your USB contents to a virtual drive, your unraid experience will be the same as if you have it running on a non-virtualized server. What I mean is that changes will get copied back to the USB drive like they should.
1850244117_2020-10-2414_16_47-pve1-ProxmoxVirtualEnvironment.png.9e5f19bbc91b2bc1e1721eafbbbe019f.png

 

5. Boot your VM

 

In summary, there are a few gotchas, getting correct NIC type, getting a USB stick to boot, and the big one, getting a good install on a USB that will boot correctly on your hardware.

I have tested a VM in Unraid (I'm NOT going to run any in Unraid under Proxmox, but it does work, and I have tested several dockers. All work as expected.

Edited by jbat66
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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, surfshack66 said:

@jbat66 Thanks for this! I have some new server equipment arriving soon so planning on running proxmox bare-metal and virtualizing unraid.

 

Why do you have to pass through the hosts processor to unraid? In your example, the 4 cores you passed through would be inaccessible to proxmox and other VMs, correct?

It is passing all the CPU features to the VM, it is not locking the VM to the CPU. When not set as "host" it emulates a CPU.

When you do pass all the CPU features to the VM, you can not migrate the VM to another host while the VM is running. Since Unraid is locked to that host because of the physical USB key, it doesn't matter that you can not migrate the VM.

If this was VMware, think of it as disabling EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) processor support. EVC is a way to emulate a particular generation of CPU. You can have several hosts all running different generations of intel CPU's and if you have all the hosts/vm's emulate the lowest common CPU, then you can live motion your VM's from one host to another.
 

 

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3 hours ago, jbat66 said:

It is passing all the CPU features to the VM, it is not locking the VM to the CPU. When not set as "host" it emulates a CPU.

When you do pass all the CPU features to the VM, you can not migrate the VM to another host while the VM is running. Since Unraid is locked to that host because of the physical USB key, it doesn't matter that you can not migrate the VM.

If this was VMware, think of it as disabling EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) processor support. EVC is a way to emulate a particular generation of CPU. You can have several hosts all running different generations of intel CPU's and if you have all the hosts/vm's emulate the lowest common CPU, then you can live motion your VM's from one host to another.
 

 

Got it. Thanks for the explanation.

 

Out of curiosity, why does unraid not work well with an emulated CPU?

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On 11/7/2020 at 9:28 AM, surfshack66 said:

Thanks for clarifying. I was asking because @jbat66 mentions "make sure..."

 

I was wanting to see if I "could" run a VM inside of unraid, while unraid was running as a VM under Proxmox. There is no need in doing this as it is better to run your VM's under the hypervisor that is talking directly to your hardware, in this case it is Proxmox. I could not get VM's in unraid to work with out passing all the CPU functions (such as virtualization) down to unraid.

While you can run an emulated CPU, the reason for doing that is to be able to migrate a running VM between dissimilar hosts. Since you can't migrate unraid you might as well pass all the CPU features onto unraid. IMHO.

Edited by jbat66
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On 11/8/2020 at 11:57 PM, jbat66 said:

I was wanting to see if I "could" run a VM inside of unraid, while unraid was running as a VM under Proxmox. There is no need in doing this as it is better to run your VM's under the hypervisor that is talking directly to your hardware, in this case it is Proxmox. I could not get VM's in unraid to work with out passing all the CPU functions (such as virtualization) down to unraid.

While you can run an emulated CPU, the reason for doing that is to be able to migrate a running VM between dissimilar hosts. Since you can't migrate unraid you might as well pass all the CPU features onto unraid. IMHO.

Got it. Thanks for the explanation @jbat66!

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  • 2 years later...

Hi, @jbat66, i'm trying unRAID VM on ProxMox.
It's running fine and for test i'm using only 1 50Gb vdisk but i don't understand why now is empty ( fresh install ) and 20Gb are already occupied on this QEMU HARD DRIVE. Why? What's the reason?
Is there a way to have all the 50Gb free as a real Hard Disk?
Thanx in advance!

Zippi

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27 minutes ago, Zippi said:

It's running fine and for test i'm using only 1 50Gb vdisk but i don't understand why now is empty ( fresh install ) and 20Gb are already occupied on this QEMU HARD DRIVE. Why? What's the reason?
Is there a way to have all the 50Gb free as a real Hard Disk?

Once you format a drive it is no longer 'empty' as the format process uses space to create the directory structure for the empty file system on the drive.   This is exactly what happens on a physical drive.

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53 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Once you format a drive it is no longer 'empty' as the format process uses space to create the directory structure for the empty file system on the drive.   This is exactly what happens on a physical drive.

Yes, i know but a new "empty" ( virtual for test ) 50 Gb HDD suffered 21 gb occupied, isn't it a bit too much?

It's the 42% occupied, isn't it a bit too much?

A real attached HDD has not so much GB occupied!

 

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44 minutes ago, Zippi said:

Or if I added a 1TB HDD would it still "only" take up 21GB? I ask because I have never tried such small disks! 🙂

Thanks for your help!

I was reading the space used as a bit less than 2%  :( 

 

Did you format the disk in Unraid?   Normally an empty file system occupies ~1% of the disk. 

 

Was there any chance the disk had previously been been formatted by Unraid - if so it would have been added and its data left intact.

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6 hours ago, Zippi said:

20Gb are already occupied on this QEMU HARD DRIVE. Why? What's the reason?

Probably because it's the only storage drive available to Unraid for the docker and virtual machine image files. I'm assuming you enabled the docker system with default settings, creating a 20GB virtual disk image file to store the downloaded container layers.

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28 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

Probably because it's the only storage drive available to Unraid for the docker and virtual machine image files. I'm assuming you enabled the docker system with default settings, creating a 20GB virtual disk image file to store the downloaded container layers.

Yes, docker is enabled and i don't touch anything of the settings...... I did not think about it.....

Now I try to add more disks to see if it changes anything.

 

Thanks and I'll update you soon!

 

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44 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

Probably because it's the only storage drive available to Unraid for the docker and virtual machine image files. I'm assuming you enabled the docker system with default settings, creating a 20GB virtual disk image file to store the downloaded container layers.

 

12 minutes ago, Zippi said:

Yes, docker is enabled and i don't touch anything of the settings...... I did not think about it.....

Now I try to add more disks to see if it changes anything.

 

Thanks and I'll update you soon!

 

@JonathanM  You are right!

That's it!

Having installed only 1 disk for the first time, what you described probably happened! I'm no expert and I'm doing some tests....

I then plugged in 2 more drives to try.....

From the image that I have attached below, can you confirm that everything is OK? Just to make sure I haven't screwed up some other setting!

Thank you so much!!!!!

 

unRAID.thumb.png.b06299efd89ab80247405e5f3e1f85e4.png

Edited by Zippi
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1 hour ago, Zippi said:

From the image that I have attached below, can you confirm that everything is OK?

No, because I am not experienced with virtualizing Unraid. All my experience is bare metal.

 

I don't understand why you would want to pass multiple small virtual disks, I assume (perhaps wrongly) that your actual disks are much larger, and you are just carving off small bits to pass through. Performance is likely to be terrible.

 

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13 hours ago, JonathanM said:

I don't understand why you would want to pass multiple small virtual disks, I assume (perhaps wrongly) that your actual disks are much larger, and you are just carving off small bits to pass through. Performance is likely to be terrible.

 

No, it's not an error.

As I wrote above it's just a test.

The idea is then to passthrough a SATA controller with all HDDs attached. I just wanted to figure out if I was doing something wrong. The performances are still excellent but, I repeat, it is only a test!

That's all.

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8 hours ago, Zippi said:

No, it's not an error.

As I wrote above it's just a test.

The idea is then to passthrough a SATA controller with all HDDs attached. I just wanted to figure out if I was doing something wrong. The performances are still excellent but, I repeat, it is only a test!

That's all.

Others have chimed in with the correct answer, in that the docker image file has to go somewhere, and the VM data also has to go somewhere if you enable it. I would recommend not doing VM's in UNRAID while under proxmox, you caaaaan, but why? Secondly I recommend just having one large disk, since you don't want to use Unraid's Raiding while virtulized, it does take a large performance hit. Your server that you are running proxmox on should have a raid of some sort, if not you can do it in unraid, but I wouldn't. If you don't have raid on your underlying server, then you could pass the drives through, but that is not how I'm using it. I just want the one click docker management that unraid gives me, and in some cases the file sharing.

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Hi @jbat66,

first of all thanks for your reply.

As I was saying above I was just doing some tests like this to mess around with a RAID VM a bit.

I'm not going to install vm in unRAID because it's obviously more "logical" to install them under ProxMox.

Like you, for example, I wanted to try the applications under Docker but only out of curiosity. I already have a bare metal unRAID Server as my main server which is great for everything, I'm very happy with it!

Having seen this thread and also having a ProxMox Server I wanted to give it a try as I told you out of curiosity. I just wanted to understand if there were wrong settings that I needed to fix or if @JonathanM's observation was right and apparently it does as the other 2 added HDDs have less occupied space.

I obviously have no intention of using such small vHDDs!

 

Thanks anyway for your contributions. I always have so many things to learn and experience!

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  • 1 month later...

Looking for some help and not sure if its even possible.

I have a jonsbo n3 and just installed some pwm fans and replaced the jonsbo 3 pins ones with Artic 4 pin pwm fans.

My morherboard is the Asus Prime n100 it has 1 pwn connector, I bought an adapter so I could connect 3 fans to this 1 port.

I had'nt thought this fully through.

Unraid cannot see the pwm sensor and Proxmox cannot see the disks as the sata adapter is passed through to unraid.

I want to control the speed of the fans based on the temperature of the drives.

Is there anyway of passing the pwm sensor from proxmox into unraid.  Failing that pass the temperature back into proxmox to control the fans from there.

Server runs headless so havent had a chance to look at bios options yet.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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