Move UnRaid from metal to Proxmox
Move UnRaid from metal to Proxmox
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ahOXQM4416Q
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=M3pKprTdNqQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you have a disk controller you can pass through.
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.
After Ai watched Lempa's video virtualizing TrueNAS passing through all drives on ProxMox, I started searching to see if anyone had tried the same with UnRaid, and TechHut actually did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahOXQM4416Q
However, my use case is somewhat different than his, and he's just a hobbyist like me, so I'm much more comfortable asking in this community where it's highly likely that someone already crashed and burned before me, lol.
I'm thinking I'll take the advise of just building a new server for ProxMox, and then use my current UnRaid box exclusively for storage. That should be somewhat safer, right?
That's my current configuration, it works well. Put your storage on a separate network. I use smb shares so my data is password protected, even on that separate network.
Main downside of this is there's more places for failure to occur. If your NAS goes down, there's no storage access for proxmox which may cause service downtime. Alternatively if proxmox goes down, this also causes service downtime. For me this is fine, but something to keep in mind. Ideal solution would be 2 HA clusters for storage and compute, but thats expensive haha.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ahOXQM4416Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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).
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=M3pKprTdNqQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-to-use-docker-containers-in-proxmox.131142/
Second result for "docker on proxmox".
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)
You can however run any LXC which you can definitely do natively.
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
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 :)
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
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?
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
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
This is actually good advise. I am running ProxMox on a very old PC (3rd Gen i3 with 8GB of ram), and I really like it, which is why I wanted to move it to my server Box instead.
But now that you mention it, I may be better off keeping my UnRaid box as it is and use is as NAS/Storage exclusively and then build a good box to run everything else from ProxMox.
My wife is going to kill me in my sleep, lol.
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.
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]