this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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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] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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

[Thread #744 for this sub, first seen 10th May 2024, 17:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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

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

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

I wouldn't, you'll lose a lot not having it manage the disks such as using dissimilar disks for the array and having it spin down unused disks. You might be able to pass disks through so the unraid VM can manage them directly, but it might be harder than I'd personally want to deal with.

If you aren't running VMs much. Truenas scale I believe can do docker well. I've seen a lot of people put that in a VM on proxmox with disks passed through to be used as the NAS portion.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

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.

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

Proxmox doesn't run docker containers. You can probably install docker to make it run them, but it's not supported.

I also wouldn't run unraid on a virtual disk just to provide storage. Personally, I have one almalinux VM running on Proxmox that runs all my containers and has a big virtual disk to store my media.

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

You can however run any LXC which you can definitely do natively.

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

Proxmox is Debian at its core, which is supported by Docker. There’s no good reason to not run Docker on the bare metal in a homelab. I’d be curious to know what statement Proxmox has made about supporting Docker. I’ve found nothing.

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

I bought a used machine a couple weeks ago and am setting it up (1st bare metal build), prox with debian vm running docker. I found it annoying that pm doesn't support it natively but the ability to do snapshots through pm is nice, and let's me fuck around more than I would otherwise, slowly build up a machine.

But almost all of the stuff I have running on other machines is just docker containers, so it would be nice if pm just added a checkbox during install or something. (I want to poke at and learn pm, plus mess around with other vms, that's why I didn't do straight Debian)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That’s not a definitive support statement about Docker being unsupported. In fact, even in the Admin Guide, it only provides recommendations. The comment I replied said Docker is unsupported by Proxmox. I maintain that there is no such statement from Proxmox.

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

Maybe not explicitly unsupported, but I think "it interferes with some mechanisms on which we rely" should be more discouraging than a policy statement.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (17 children)

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3pKprTdNqQ

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