UnRaid boot from snapshots?

[m9x3mos]

Hello All,

I run a home lab currently that is based on Windows Server 2016. I have found lately that my storage spaces solution that is using tiered storage with an ssd and 3 hdds is really slow. I have tested using unraid so far at home with 2 cache ssds and 3 mechanicals and crystal mark shows much better reads and writes of 1200 vs 300 mbps. For space savings, while watching the 7 gamers 1 cpu video again, Linus mentioned about using BTRFS to snapshot and boot off that with changes being kept in the dedicated drive for the machine to save space. I am having trouble finding information on how to do that. Does anyone know where I can find that information or what it is?

[AMDKilla]

You would have to format your entire array as BTRFS as you can't run two separate arrays on one system. I believe you can get a plugin that allows you use unassigned devices separate from the array, but they wouldn't have any kind of parity protection.

As far as I am aware, you'll lose any data on the drives you format. I also don't know how much space you would save, but it depends on what you are using the VMs for

[m9x3mos]

Thanks. I was able to chat with someone over at unraid who was able to point me in the right direction. I was able to get this working and the feature of space saving works pretty well. Basically I am running about 15 VMs with just different small applications running on each one (micro services) that will run for one over all application and each VM runs two and use it for testing fail over. So they are all really the same Windows install but only small stuff put on top of it. 

For anyone else that is interested, here is what I was able to find out about it.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/51703-vm-faq/?tab=comments#comment-523800

 

I will be doing another post though as while this does seem to work, on larger VMs that I do change alot (2 that run SQL server and the like) seem to get moved off my cache drive to mechanical storage and then is much slower as the cache drive doesn't have enough space to hold everything. I am wondering if there is some other cache accelerated storage solution instead that would work better. Something that were the most recent parts of files and data used are kept in the SSD cache and lesser used data is moved to the slower tier storage.

18 hours ago, AMDKilla said:

You would have to format your entire array as BTRFS as you can't run two separate arrays on one system. I believe you can get a plugin that allows you use unassigned devices separate from the array, but they wouldn't have any kind of parity protection.

As far as I am aware, you'll lose any data on the drives you format. I also don't know how much space you would save, but it depends on what you are using the VMs for

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Windows supports snapshotting aswell on ntfs, so this isn't a btrfs only feture.

 

What are collums set to on storage spaces? That can speed it up a good amount. unraid is known for being very slow though.

 

 

[Salacious B Crum]

15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

unraid is known for being very slow though.

 

 

X2 very slow over other options but its got a great feature set and the forum has great support