I have a trusty UnRaid server that has been running great for almost 3 years now, with some kinks and headaches here and there, but mostly very stable. Now I’m entertaining the idea of setting that box up with ProxMox, and running UnRaid virtualized. The reason being that I want to use UnRaid exclusively as a NAS and then run all dockers and VMs on ProxMox (at least that’s how I’m picturing it). I would like to know your opinion on this idea. All I have is Nextcloud, Immich, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, Calibre, Kavita and a Windows VM I use to update some hardware every now and then. I mainly want to do that for the backup capabilities in ProxMox for each instance. Storage is not a concern, and I have 64GB of ECC Ram running in that box. What are the Pros and Cons, or is it even worth it to move all this to ProxMox?
Use either proxmox or unraid. Don’t stack.
They are both great in their own respects but you need to choose what works for you and your hardware.
Up until recently I liked unraid due to being able to use multiple disks with different capacities. You don’t really have that freedom with proxmox.
To most of your comment I completely agree minus the freedom for choosing different disk sizes. You absolutely can do that with btrfs or just throwing a virtual layer on top of some disks with something like mergerfs.
You’re correct, with a bit more know how and knowledge it’s completely doable. Quick question maybe, once you create a pool and are utilizing it, are you able to add/remove drives as needed or does that require additional work to be completed? I am under the impression that the pools can be created with a variety of drives but making any physical adjustments are a bit of trouble.
However, I do appreciate you posting about this, maybe it’ll help someone else that might be browsing through here. Thank you.
And that’s why I chose to ask here. More heads put together come up with better choices. Watching this TechHut video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahOXQM4416Q) and another one from Christian Lempa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3pKprTdNqQ) is what led me to think it could be an idea.
I guess it’s the “add another server” to route for me.
Thanks so much.
Best of luck jjlinux. I hope you have a ton of fun getting your system up and running.
If you have a disk controller you can pass through.
I’ve been running Unraid on top of Proxmox for over 3 years. No problems whatsoever. I initially bought a RAID controller to directly pass the drives to the UnRAID VM. Another option is to passthrough the SATA controller of your motherboard (only possible if you don’t use them on the host).
I documented the process on my blog (it’s quite straightforward): https://simplyexplained.com/blog/howto-virtualize-unraid-on-proxmox-host/
So, if I’m running ProxMox off of 2 NVMe drives in RAID, I can just pass through SATA and USB for the UnRaid VM and just NFS my way to happiness, right?
I’m still testing each of my UnRaid containers on ProxMox, and so far they all work fine. With a Ryzen 7 5700G and 64GB ECC RAM, I could give the UnRaid VM just 2 cores and 4GB of RAM, and should be smooth sailing from there, right?
Yep! The only requirement is that your NVMe controller is in a separate IOMMU group than the SATA controller. But that should be the case.
Awesome. I am happier every day I’m in Lemmy and out of Reddit. You guys are flat out amazing. Thank you.
If you want to just use it exclusively as a Nas, then why not truenas?
I have a unRAID server but the nas part is nowhere as good as truenas (slower, worse ad integration)
Main issue with virtualization is the bootable USB with the serial number that’s used as DRM
It’s understandable that you want to take your virtualization-capabilities to the next level but I also don’t see the appeal of containerizing unraid like many others here. I started using unraid last autumn and to me it really is about being able to mix drive sizes. It’s a backup to my main server’s ZFS pool so (fingers crossed) I don’t even really worry about drive failures on unraid. (I have double parity on ZFS and single parity on unraid.)
Anyways my point is I started out with 8 SATA slots plus an old USB-based enclosure with i set to JBOD mode and that was a pretty stupid idea. unraid couldn’t read SMART data from those USB drives. Every once in a while one of the drives would suddenly show up as having an unsupported partition layout. Couple weeks ago all 5 drives in the enclosure started showing up as unusable. So as you can imagine I dropped that enclosure and now am working solely off the 8 internal slots. I’d imagine that virtualizing unraid’s disk access might potentially yield similar issues. At least the comments of people here remind me of my own janky setup.
You do make a great point. I really am feeling more inclined to spinning up a new rig for ProxMox, and leave my UnRaid to do what it’s good at in it’s bare metal state as it is today.
This self hosting rabbit hole runs scarily deep.
Once you face the (seemingly) inevitable necessity of further hardware purchases it does become sort of tedious I must say. I used to treat my raid parity as a “backup” for way longer than I’d like to admit because I didn’t want my costs to double. With unraid I at least don’t have the same management workload that I have on my main box where I have a rolling release Arch with manually installed ZFS where the build always has to line up with the kernel version and all that jazz. Unraid is my deploy and forget box. Rsync every 24h. God bless.
Proxmox has been recommended to me before I switched my main server to Arch but once I realised that it has no direct docker support I thought I’d rather just do things myself. It really is a matter of preference. It’s kind of hard to believe that all the functionality in Proxmox can be had for absolutely free.
That’s why I built 2 of my boxes, and have them Rsync 2,500 miles away from each other. My brother was nice enough to let me set the backup box in his garage. I too was mistakenly under the impression that parity was enough to keep my data safe. Once I went over some horror stories in the forums, I duplicated my purchase, built an exact replica of my box, and then set it up at my brother’s house.
2500 miles sheesh. That shit’s nuclear war proof then.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity k8s Kubernetes container management package
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Oof. No.
Wouldn’t do it for a litany of reasons, but the main being that it’s not meant for such things. You want it to be as close to the OS and drivers as possible. Anything getting between Unraid managing the disks is overly complex, and asking for trouble. What happens if the container dies? What happens if the container gets OOMkill’d?
If you’re not going to use it to manage your disks, then I guess no issues, but there’s better suited software for such things.
Isn’t Unraid also a VM host of sorts?
Yeah, UnRaid does all of that, but from my very basic testing of ProxMox in an old computer, the VM management is much better than in UnRaid. The same goes for VLAN awareness with just 1 nic.
I’m in no way unsatisfied with UnRaid, but I watched a video by Christian Lempa doing something similar, only with TrueNAS instead of UnRaid, which is what got my brain thinking about all these potential options.
There’s the question of “CAN I do this?” vs “SHOULD I do this?”. I don’t think abstracting your main storage handling software away from where it definitely needs to be is going to net you anything positive, but add more issues and complications.
I’m sure you can find videos of people running drivers out of containers just because it’s possible. Should you though? Nope.
I do have the advantage of having a mirror of my server 2.5K miles away in my brother’s house. That’s probably why I’m thinking about being so candidly careless.
I appreciate the great advise. But now I’m willing to take one for the team and come back with either am horror story or an epic win.
BRB.
Have you considered the increase in disk io and that hypervisor prefer to be in control of all hardware? Including disks…
If you are set on proxmox consider that it can directly share your data itself. This could be made easy with cockpit and the zfs plugin. The plugin helps if you have existing pools. Both can be installed directly on proxmox and present a separate web UI with different options for system management.
The safe things here to use are the filesharing and pool management operations. Basically use the proxmox webui for everything it permits first.
Either way have fun.
That sounds like a great idea.
At the moment I am using Openmediavault as a VM within proxmox - I pass my HDDs through to this VM. Openmediavault let’s me do all the stuff I want to: Share folders via SSH, NFS and raid-management.
Do you know if I can do the same with proxmox directly? Do you maybe have a link where this way is described in detail?
At its core cockpit is like a modern day webmin that allows full system management. So yes it can help with creating raid devices and even lvms. It can help with mount points and encryption as well.
I do know it can help share whatever with smb and NFS. Just have a look at the plugins.
As for proxmox it’s just using Debian underneath. That Debian already happens to be optimized for virtualization and has native zfs support baked in.
I actually never considered this. And if I’m understanding you correctly, this would render using UnRaid unnecessary.
This is great info. I’m going to fit my current ProxMox test rig with a few disks I have (old small disks I have replaced over the years that still work) and test this option first. This might make this easier.
If this works out, I can still keep the server I set up off-site to mirror my storage, right? Even if that is still UnRaid? I need more coffee.
Yup you can. In fact you likely should and will probably find yourself improving disk io dramatically compared to your original thoughts doing this. It’s better in my opinion to let the hypervisor manage disks operations. That means in my opinion it should also share files with smb and NFS especially if you are already considering nas type operations.
Since proxmox supports zfs out of the box along with btrfs and even XFS you have a myriad of options. You combine that with cockpit and you have a nice management interface.
I went the zfs route because I’m familiar with it and I appreciate it’s native sharing options built into the filesystem. It’s cool to have the option to create a new dataset off the pool and directly pass it into a new lxc container.
I’m very inclined to use this method instead.
I would like to ask for some suggestions on the initial process to migrate the data from UnRaid.
Considering that:
- My disk pool is made out of 2 10TB disks, for a total of 20TB
- It also has a 10TB parity disk
- The pool is using just -6TB of the storage
The option I see is:
- Get another 10TB disk
- I can clear the parity drive and copy my data from the pool to that disk for migrating
- Configure the pool disks to RaidZ and once I complete that, use the other 2 disks as parity pool
Or, I bite the bullet, get brand new 10TB disks, 12 to make it Raidz2 and have a storage pool of 40TB (35 usable?). I’m thinking 4 groups of 3 disks each should do the trick. Then use the same method to migrate my data.
With 64GB of ECC RAM, I should have a pretty swift storage IOPS that way.
If you virtualize unraid, unraid wont have direct drive access - you can get around this by getting an HBA card and forwarding that to the unraid VM. Others have mentioned that proxmox doesn’t have docker support, I personally run docker containers within lxc boxes on proxmox. There are solutions to make managing containers easier, like portainer, if you want to go down that route.
Run docker within lxc within proxmox. This gave me an aneurism. You’ve lost the whole point of not actually virtualizing with containers by putting in two layers deep in virtualization. At this point your shit is so convoluted why don’t you just run kubernetes
How is running a container in an LXC worse than in a VM? It’s not really, is it? No, not really. Kubernetes could also be built on top of the LXC as well, sure. There are a number of genuine benifits from running docker on top of an LXC, and it doesn’t compromise security or come with a significant performance drop (unlike VMs).
I was suggesting to do neither and run the container directly. Putting k8s on top of lxc is still completely stupid. Just run k8s bare metal to operate your containers.
I am in the same boat currently and thinking about how I can migrate my stuff over without having a 1 month downtime EDIT: after reading all the comments I’m still not sure if I should do it or like I said even how. I love my unraid it fits me well however I think I also have fallen in love with proxmox
Yup. I think I’m going to go the 2 servers way after all, but not before I try doing it in one, because, we’ll, why not? Isn’t that what home labs are about? 🤣🤣🤣
Please keep me up to date what you try and how you are trying to migrate it over! :D and obviously good luck
Absolutely. This is why I love Lemmy as a whole, and my wife hates it.
The combined amount of wisdom I’ve found here interacting with so many smart individuals is a serious treasure of knowledge and a powerful drive to keep exploring and learning.
If you want to move to Proxmox then I say give it a go.
Maybe just keep what you have running and set up another machine to have a play. If you like it, then stick it on your main machine and work out how to replace everything, could be a fun project for you.
I use Proxmox and have Open Media Vault as my NAS. I use SMB/CIFS to share the drives and have a share that Proxmox can use for daily backups, as well as having backups on the main SSD every week. I need to off-site backups but I haven’t researched that yet.
I have a Debian VM that runs Docker and have everything running on that except OMV and Home Assistant. I have another Debian VM that I spin up to try things out.
RAM-wise I’m hitting about 12gb so if you have something with 16 lying around you can easily try out most of what you have running already, and if you don’t have anything to run it on you’re talking under £100 for a mini PC.
Give it a go, I’m sure you can come up with something to run on a mini pc anyway
