PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP SOFTWARE
PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP PC
PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP MAC
PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP WINDOWS

Using VMDirectPath I/O to passthrough the disks directly to the unRAID VM, and letting unRAID manage the disks on its own. Doesn’t allow unRAID to manage the drives directly, including SMART parameters and various low-level sensors.I don’t have 4TB of swap space laying around… Doesn’t meet my requirement for transparent migration, as it requires reformatting all the drives to VMFS, thus losing the existing data.Possible capacity loss due to limitations on the size of virtual disks in VMFS, which might be smaller than the actual capacity of the physical drive.

PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP SOFTWARE

Performance hell: This configuration goes through all possible software and hardware layers for every read/write operation.This is also probably the worst possible solution, for any and all of the following reasons:

It is natively supported in ESXi, and doesn’t involve any “hardware magic”.

Adding the data drives as datastore drives in the ESXi host, formatting them using VMFS, creating maximum-size virtual disks on each drive, and assigning the virtual disks to the unRAID VM.

Let’s review the available solutions for configuring data drives for use in the unRAID VM: This concludes the unRAID-VM creation process, but it still has very little use as long as the data drives are not present, which is what the next section covers.

PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP MAC

Getting to the unRAID shell console in vSphere, and checking MAC address To tackle the first challenge – I decided to go for a solution that allows a VM to boot from a physical USB flash drive, using the Plop Boot Manager. Mordor 1.0 managed 3 data-drives (2TB each), and this is all the large drives I have, so I must have the unRAID VM working with the existing configuration and data, while minimizing the risk that something bad happens to my data during the process.Ĭreate an unRAID VM that boots from a USB flash drive using Plop Boot Manager

I don’t have the luxury of having separate “production” and “staging” servers, to experiment without affecting my actual system and data.

ESXi, running on VT-d-enabled hardware, has support for DirectPath I/O passthrough – but it is far from simple and/or straight forward to use it directly with physical drives… Thus, it makes sense to give unRAID complete and absolute control of the NAS hard-drives it will manage.

The main function of unRAID is to manage storage.

unRAID runs from a USB flash drive as its boot media, and persistent memory for configuration and plugins, but ESXi doesn’t offer a “boot a VM from USB flash drive” option, nor does it support simulating a USB flash drive as a VM booting media.

So, what are the challenges in running unRAID as a VM? And what are some of the requirements I have from this set up and migration process? I went with a sync command parameterized with -backup-dir.Install unRAID NAS OS as a VM on ESXi host to improve resource utilization of your home server! I deployed this to the Unraid server and set about defining the command-line to use to backup my Unraid settings. See instructions here.Īfter running the configuration I had an nf file ready to go.

PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP WINDOWS

To do this I downloaded the Windows binary instead, because RClone has a simple interactive flow you can use to create a configuration file.

That said, in order to actually get started with RClone you need to configure it first, that is give it access to whatever cloud service you want to access. The RClone image I used is rclone/rclone:latest.

PERSONAL USE UNRAID SETUP PC

It's also nice that I could test things out on my Windows PC and easily move the setup to my Unraid server.

To accomplish this task I'm using RClone and I'm using it from a Docker container, primarily to continue on my learning journey with Docker. It's also just nice to have the data available locally. That's in case of catastrophic failure on Microsoft's side, or more likely, I mess up and nuke my OneDrive folder for whatever reason. Today I'm trying to setup my Unraid server to take a daily backup of the contents of my OneDrive folder.

Personal use unraid setup