this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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57
Move UnRaid from metal to Proxmox (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
62 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Awesome. I am happier every day I'm in Lemmy and out of Reddit. You guys are flat out amazing. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

2500 miles sheesh. That shit's nuclear war proof then.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's the production vs development issue. My advice is the old tech advice. "If it's not broken don't try to fix it"

Modified into a separate proxmox development environment. Btw proxmox is perfect for this with vm and container snapshots.

When you get a vm or container in a more production ready state then you can attempt migrations. That way the users don't kill you :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That is true, I mean I mostly only use my homelab except some game servers that I am running. And you are totally right. Only reason why I want to run proxmox or in general why I have a homelab is to learn more about servers and self hosting. I am currently in the first year of my apprenticeship and I have learned so much since I got my server up and running 😄 and I think I can learn a lot more when I am using proxmox

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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? 🤣🤣🤣

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Please keep me up to date what you try and how you are trying to migrate it over! :D and obviously good luck

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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.

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