stupid Stupid idea, please tell me how stupid it is.

[BOOZy]

Hello fellow geeks,

 

I'm planning to build my own unRAID NAS, but running VMWare in my homelab already got me thinking.

"What if the NAS also runs VMWare?"

So that set off a whole string of ideas of which my last one has such a thin line between genius and stupid I just have to do it.

 

The idea:

 

Get an SSD and a bunch of large harddrives.

Don't get a RAID controller

Install VMWare on the SSD

Install unRAID in a VM (on the SSD)

Attach the harddrives to the unRAID VM (direct mapping, not an image)

Create a RAID volume in unRAID like normal and enable CIFS, NFS, etc. shares.

Attach the unRAID volume to VMWare via NFS so I can run more VMs with plenty of disk space.

Optional bonus stupid idea: create a Windows VM and attach an iSCSI volume to it so I can use native Windows credentials for shares.

 

And presto, a NAS and VMWare box all in one.

 

[Blebekblebek]

I think that's what people been doing all this time, and I'm actually the only one who got upset when even know about it, from "problem solver" perspective, just think about what can you do if any drive from this setup is failing, how can you recover it? the answers is pretty much, None, you're screwed.

[BOOZy]

2 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

I think that's what people been doing all this time, and I'm actually the only one who got upset when even know about it, from "problem solver" perspective, just think about what can you do if any drive from this setup is failing, how can you recover it? the answers is pretty much, None, you're screwed.

A drive failure wouldn't even be that big of a problem I think. As long as either VMWare or unRAID reports it.

Adding a new drive to the RAID volume wouldn't be an automated process though, far from it.

Hell, now I think about it, knowing which drive has failed in the first place would be 'fun' to find out too.