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.
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.
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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.
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.
I do have the advantage of having a mirror of my server 2.5K miles away in my brother’s house. That’s probably why I’m thinking about being so candidly careless.
I appreciate the great advise. But now I’m willing to take one for the team and come back with either am horror story or an epic win.
BRB.
Have you considered the increase in disk io and that hypervisor prefer to be in control of all hardware? Including disks…
If you are set on proxmox consider that it can directly share your data itself. This could be made easy with cockpit and the zfs plugin. The plugin helps if you have existing pools. Both can be installed directly on proxmox and present a separate web UI with different options for system management.
The safe things here to use are the filesharing and pool management operations. Basically use the proxmox webui for everything it permits first.
Either way have fun.
That sounds like a great idea.
At the moment I am using Openmediavault as a VM within proxmox - I pass my HDDs through to this VM. Openmediavault let’s me do all the stuff I want to: Share folders via SSH, NFS and raid-management.
Do you know if I can do the same with proxmox directly? Do you maybe have a link where this way is described in detail?
At its core cockpit is like a modern day webmin that allows full system management. So yes it can help with creating raid devices and even lvms. It can help with mount points and encryption as well.
I do know it can help share whatever with smb and NFS. Just have a look at the plugins.
As for proxmox it’s just using Debian underneath. That Debian already happens to be optimized for virtualization and has native zfs support baked in.
I actually never considered this. And if I’m understanding you correctly, this would render using UnRaid unnecessary.
This is great info. I’m going to fit my current ProxMox test rig with a few disks I have (old small disks I have replaced over the years that still work) and test this option first. This might make this easier.
If this works out, I can still keep the server I set up off-site to mirror my storage, right? Even if that is still UnRaid? I need more coffee.
Yup you can. In fact you likely should and will probably find yourself improving disk io dramatically compared to your original thoughts doing this. It’s better in my opinion to let the hypervisor manage disks operations. That means in my opinion it should also share files with smb and NFS especially if you are already considering nas type operations.
Since proxmox supports zfs out of the box along with btrfs and even XFS you have a myriad of options. You combine that with cockpit and you have a nice management interface.
I went the zfs route because I’m familiar with it and I appreciate it’s native sharing options built into the filesystem. It’s cool to have the option to create a new dataset off the pool and directly pass it into a new lxc container.
I’m very inclined to use this method instead.
I would like to ask for some suggestions on the initial process to migrate the data from UnRaid.
Considering that:
- My disk pool is made out of 2 10TB disks, for a total of 20TB
- It also has a 10TB parity disk
- The pool is using just -6TB of the storage
The option I see is:
- Get another 10TB disk
- I can clear the parity drive and copy my data from the pool to that disk for migrating
- Configure the pool disks to RaidZ and once I complete that, use the other 2 disks as parity pool
Or, I bite the bullet, get brand new 10TB disks, 12 to make it Raidz2 and have a storage pool of 40TB (35 usable?). I’m thinking 4 groups of 3 disks each should do the trick. Then use the same method to migrate my data.
With 64GB of ECC RAM, I should have a pretty swift storage IOPS that way.
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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?
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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”.
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.
Maybe not explicitly unsupported, but I think “it interferes with some mechanisms on which we rely” should be more discouraging than a policy statement.
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)
I am with you on the advantages of running it in a VM. The isolation a VM provides is really nice. Snapshots FTW.
You can however run any LXC which you can definitely do natively.
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?
Yep! The only requirement is that your NVMe controller is in a separate IOMMU group than the SATA controller. But that should be the case.
Awesome. I am happier every day I’m in Lemmy and out of Reddit. You guys are flat out amazing. Thank you.
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.
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
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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.
