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.
It depends on your needs. It’s entirely possible to just format a bunch of disks as xfs and setup some mount points you hand to a union filesystem like mergerfs or whatever. Then you would just hand that to proxmox directly as a storage location. Management can absolutely vary depending how you do this.
At its heart it’s just Debian so it has all those abilities of Debian. The web UI is more tuned to vm/lxc management operations. I don’t really like the default lvm/ext4 but they do that to give access to snapshots.
I personally just imported an existing zfs pool into proxmox and configured it to my liking. I discovered options like directly passing datasets into lxc containers with lxc options like lxc.mount.entry
I recently finished optimizing my proxmox for performance in regards to disk io. It’s modified with things like log2ram, tmpfs in fstab for /tmp and /var/tmp, tcp congestion control set to cubic, a virtual opnsense heavily modified for 10gb performance, a bunch of zfs media datasets migrated to one media dataset and optimized for performance. Just so many tweaks and knobs to turn in proxmox that can increase performance. Folks even mention docker I’ve got it contained in an lxc. My active ram usage for all my services down to 7 gigs and disk io jumping .9 - 8%. That’s crazy but it just works.
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.
Best of luck jjlinux. I hope you have a ton of fun getting your system up and running.
Thanks a lot, I’ll update my progress, if my wife chooses to spare my life once I start 🤣
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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.
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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).
I was suggesting to do neither and run the container directly. Putting k8s on top of lxc is still completely stupid. Just run k8s bare metal to operate your containers.
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.
You’re thinking about this wrong way though. Why are trying to abstract the thing that keeps your disks working properly? What’s your gain here?
Oh, ok. Mainly 3 things:
- Manage all my containers and VMs over ProxMox instead of inside UnRaid directly, effectively leaving UnRaid to be just manage storage only.
- This, from my understanding, will in turn allow me to play with container options other than docker (docker is awesome, I know, but it also has limitations), effectively opening new roads of knowledge to me. UnRaid doesn’t even support Kubernetes or LXC.
- Easier VLAN management in the server side. I have to play with firewall permissions on my PFSense to allow some containers to talk to others. ProxMox, being VLAN aware, would allow me to eliminate those permissions from PFSense and just manage interconnectivity via ProxMox.
While I’m aware that I can even compose dockers in UnRaid if there’s no UnRaid docker template available, it’s not the most user friendly way for managing those containers, in my opinion.
Another reason is that I’m always trying to learn new things, and from my limited experience with ProxMox (I’ve only been playing with it for about a month or so on an old rig), ProxMox is incredibly easy and powerful when it comes to container and VM deployment. The management options seem to be infinite.
Your point is very solid, which is why I’m contemplating segregating UnRaid and ProxMox into 2 separate rigs as opposed to virtualizing UnRaid.
These are hard decisions. Keep just 1 rig and spend way more time and probably migraines configuring this, or just build a new rig for ProxMox and migrate all my containers and VMs to it, which is faster, but will come at a higher monetary price, including power consumption.
Just get a separate host for whatever the VM stuff you want. You won’t need to worry about messing anything related to storage up, AND you’ll be able to mess with all the networking stuff without impacting your NAS.
If you’re just trying to run some simple services, just get a $300 Ryzen minipc. Plenty powerful for what it sounds like you’re looking to do.
Yeah. I told my wife what I wanted to do, and she actually would rather have me spend the money than risk spending too much time if and when I break something. I’m thinking a minispc Ryzen 9 or a Ryzen 7 venus, set it up with a 4TB NVMe. That should do the trick. It’s a bit over 300 bucks, but will be a bit more future proof. 64GB DDR5, and fire it away.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
That’s why I built 2 of my boxes, and have them Rsync 2,500 miles away from each other. My brother was nice enough to let me set the backup box in his garage. I too was mistakenly under the impression that parity was enough to keep my data safe. Once I went over some horror stories in the forums, I duplicated my purchase, built an exact replica of my box, and then set it up at my brother’s house.
2500 miles sheesh. That shit’s nuclear war proof then.
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 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
Yup. I think I’m going to go the 2 servers way after all, but not before I try doing it in one, because, we’ll, why not? Isn’t that what home labs are about? 🤣🤣🤣
Please keep me up to date what you try and how you are trying to migrate it over! :D and obviously good luck
Absolutely. This is why I love Lemmy as a whole, and my wife hates it.
The combined amount of wisdom I’ve found here interacting with so many smart individuals is a serious treasure of knowledge and a powerful drive to keep exploring and learning.
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
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’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.
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.
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
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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