UNRAID or upgrade

[bigluke82]

Good morning people so the pc that’s attached to the main tv is old tired it’s intel lol (G1840) and it’s time to put it out to pasture, I’m currently running truenas on my server that is powered by a Ryzen 5600x with 64gb of 3200 ram, it is mainly used for storage and VM’s it has the stock nic on the msi x470 that I use for vm’s plus a 2 port Intel X550AT 10Gb nic’s for fast storage access. 

17 drives in total 2 480gb ssd’s as coach and log 6 drives connected with via the boards onboard sata ports, another 6 attached via a pcie gen2x4 card plus another 4 attached via a m.2 5 port pcie 2x4 card and the os on some random cheap nvme m.2 and some random graphics card for debugging, so with all the drive I cant use the free version of unraid to try it out I will have to pay for the €110 odd for the for the Pro version.

 

I will be salvaging the 1030 card from the old pc.

 

I have never use unraid I’ve only seen it online and watched some vid’s on youtude my understanding is I can set it up and a big nas and passthrough the graphics card one of the nic’s and a couple of usb ports to a windows vm?

 

Will I need to have 2 graphics cards or can I give the one over to the vm as the nas will not need it

 

Can I still run vm’s in a vnc window over the network?

 

The pc that it will be replacing is used for watching uk tv as I live in Spain plus prime video and Netflix will I be able to limit it to only 2 cores and 4 threads?

 

Will I still be able to have my vm’s for my sink-hole and vpn both Linux based?

 

Is the CPU allocations a hard point allocation or are they virtual cores like in truenas where vm need more cpu can use it? 

 

What sort of redundancy will I get with unrapid right now I I’m running raidz with a couple of hot spears just incase 

 

Thank you in advance for your input and advice 

 

so is it worth me getting unraid or just upgrading the tv pc ?
 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id use proxmox instead, then you can keep the same zfs pools.

 

ALso why not run windows on the host pc? Then you can manage the store with storage spaces, and run vms with hyper-v, should work fine here.

 

8 hours ago, bigluke82 said:

Can I still run vm’s in a vnc window over the network?

 

Yup

 

8 hours ago, bigluke82 said:

Will I need to have 2 graphics cards or can I give the one over to the vm as the nas will not need it

 

You normally want a sepgrade gpu for boot asit makes troubleshooting much easier

 

 

8 hours ago, bigluke82 said:

Will I still be able to have my vm’s for my sink-hole and vpn both Linux based?

 

yup

 

8 hours ago, bigluke82 said:

What sort of redundancy will I get with unrapid right now I I’m running raidz with a couple of hot spears just incase 

 

Id use proxmox, so you can keep the same raidz pools

 

 

[Loki0111]

The big advantage to Unraid is the interface and support. For what it does it works extremely well.

 

The big downside is it does not use any form of RAID which means you are limited to single disk access speeds, there is caching but almost every solution has caching these days so that is not a bragging point. If you are on anything faster then 1gbe you will notice a significant speed drop on sustained transfers.

 

It really all comes down to your specific use case and what the server is primarily being used for. If this is more of a workstation or service providing server Unraid maybe a viable option. If this is primarily a NAS connected to a higher speed network you probably don't want to go down this road.

[Aragorn-]

Proxmox would be my suggestion.

[ItsCryptic]

Proxmox

[bigluke82]

can you do pcie passthrough with proxmox ? as easly as you can with unraid ? i've ordered a 1tb sn850 today and a Asus ROG Strix X570-F Gaming board today for it today and i will e changing out the 5600x for my 5800x that is in my desktop right now as i have a 5900x coming next week, right now iv copied everything off my nas it's all spread out on ever old laptop and hhd ssd amd usb stick i could find lol when i put it back together it will have 8x 4tb hdd's plus the gen 4 ssd i could order a second ssd and happly go back to running raidz 2x z1 pools but i would need a second gen 4 ssd the new board has the space on it, witch ever way i do it i have a i have a couple weeks befor i need to be back at work and with all my data off the nas i can try a couple of things before have to deside on a os and hay ive got enough left over bits to build a extra rig to sell and get some money bback lol 

[bigluke82]

   I'm not sure why I put rgb fans since there is no window, but they were the only 4-pin I had in the house, Ryzen 7 5800x, strix gaming f x570 board, 128gb of viper ram, 8 hard drives of 3, 5 inch 3tb and 2x WD sn850 as a couch and for virtual machines I found a 2gb gt 730 that I didn't even realize I had so it's gone further a shitty 1gb gt 710 I was using to debug on my old server and I have ordered one of these https://lifeinformatica.com/tienda/asus-geforce-gt710-4h-sl-2gb-gd5-grafica/
for a second vm to watch tv in the bedroom sending HDMI over the network and I no longer have to watch the same as in the living room I tried proxmox but didn't follow it without fear, it seems to be doing the job well but We'll see how it does it. You are running the additional virtual machines, but I think it will be fine, none of them will need a lot of power and i think ive spect it quite well    

 

 

 

[Mihle]

On 2/22/2021 at 6:29 AM, Loki0111 said:

The big advantage to Unraid is the interface and support. For what it does it works extremely well.

 

The big downside is it does not use any form of RAID which means you are limited to single disk access speeds, 

The benefit to what Unraid is doing instead of raid is that it's much easier to add more drives later.

 

Also, if you have 3 data disks and 1 parity for example, if you loose 2 in RAID, everything is lost, but in Unraid, you would still have data on the rest of the drives, wonif parity and one data dies you still have 2 data devices with intact data. You still loose some data tho so don't know how much of a benefit that is.

[Loki0111]

On 3/1/2021 at 10:50 AM, Mihle said:

The benefit to what Unraid is doing instead of raid is that it's much easier to add more drives later.

 

Also, if you have 3 data disks and 1 parity for example, if you loose 2 in RAID, everything is lost, but in Unraid, you would still have data on the rest of the drives, wonif parity and one data dies you still have 2 data devices with intact data. You still loose some data tho so don't know how much of a benefit that is.

There are more resilient drive configurations even in RAID setups, its one of the reasons enterprise uses its own take on RAID. If your data is absolutely critical there are near bulletproof configuration options available that exceed anything Unraid will be able to do. The difficulty in adding drives also depends on your setup. If you are using a parity setup then yes its going to be more work, if you are using a mirrored array with vdevs then no adding more drives is super easy.

 

And at the end of the day losing close to 90% of my sustained file transfer speed (I'm on 10gbe) is frankly not worth it in any scenario.

[Mihle]

35 minutes ago, Loki0111 said:

There are more resilient drive configurations even in RAID setups, its one of the reasons enterprise uses its own take on RAID. If your data is absolutely critical there are near bulletproof configuration options available that exceed anything Unraid will be able to do. 

I don't know about those ones, but it's not anything I have heard peopl having in their NAS/Home server anyway.

35 minutes ago, Loki0111 said:

The difficulty in adding drives also depends on your setup. If you are using a parity setup then yes its going to be more work, if you are using a mirrored array with vdevs then no adding more drives is super easy.

If you use mirrored you don't get extra speed I don't think? And you then have to add two and two drives? (If mirrored one time)

35 minutes ago, Loki0111 said:

And at the end of the day losing close to 90% of my sustained file transfer speed (I'm on 10gbe) is frankly not worth it in any scenario.

90%? What HDDs are you using?

 

also, what you go for is what the person(s) that is going  think it needs/wants, I never said Unraid is best in all ways or anything, just said some advantages.

 

I haven't done GPU passthrough or similar myself on Unraid, but for other things, it seemed easier to use Unraid than alternatives, but I don't know if that has changed since I did the choice to what to go for.

 

[Loki0111]

22 hours ago, Mihle said:

I don't know about those ones, but it's not anything I have heard peopl having in their NAS/Home server anyway.

If you use mirrored you don't get extra speed I don't think? And you then have to add two and two drives? (If mirrored one time)

90%? What HDDs are you using?

Its a two mirrored arrays.

 

One is an 8 spinning disk array with around 80TB. The other 8 disk SSD array with about 16 TB. Both are behind an L1, L2 cache.

22 hours ago, Mihle said:

 

also, what you go for is what the person(s) that is going  think it needs/wants, I never said Unraid is best in all ways or anything, just said some advantages.

 

I haven't done GPU passthrough or similar myself on Unraid, but for other things, it seemed easier to use Unraid than alternatives, but I don't know if that has changed since I did the choice to what to go for.

 

 

[Mihle]

1 hour ago, Loki0111 said:

Its a two mirrored arrays.

 

One is an 8 spinning disk array with around 80TB. The other 8 disk SSD array with about 16 TB. Both are behind an L1, L2 cache.

 

I mean, my HDDs start at about 200 MS/s at the start and drops to about 160 MB/s in large transfers. That is more than 10% of 10Gbit...(Internally, I have 1Gbit networking tho to that limits it, I want to maybe go 2,5gb one time maybe)

 

Unless it's very  professional (or semi professional) usage, I don't see why you would need anything faster than a single SSD speed. (Tho more than one HDD at the time speed maybe, but that is up to the person to decide)