Unraid on Proxmox, or VMs on Unraid

[darkblade]

I’m currently running a large Xpenology setup (including Plex), plus some other VMs on a Proxmox build.
Xpenology works, but took a lot of effort plus trial and error to get setup correctly and recognise all the drives.
So I want to switch to Unraid.

How do I decide whether to run Unraid as a VM on Proxmox, or ditch Proxmox and run my VMs on Unraid?
The server has 24 HDDs and 8 SSDs, plus 128GB of ram.

Have any of you run Unraid on Proxmox with dockers?

 

[IanAG]

With a single server I would use Unraid with VMs. I use both, with Unraid primarily for storage and services directly using the storage like Plex. I prefer Proxmox for VMs and even docker (within an ubuntu VM), but the main reason for that is the snapshot/backup capabilities.

Unraid is certainly capable of extensive VM/docker usage, I just decided to isolate the things I have running. I virtualised various things within Unraid/Proxmox before like Pfsense, Unraid is not something I would consider virtualising.

 

[darkblade]

Unraid is not something I would consider virtualising.

Yeah, that's the way I'm leaning too.
Just trying to get my head around Unraid and VMs, but it looks pretty straight forward and you can pass devices and hard drives into the VM.

 

[MTA99]

Have you made a decision yet? If you're comfortable with Proxmox I'd stick with it and run Unraid as a VM.

After years (close to a decade) running Unraid on bare metal I decided to virtualise on Proxmox. I run pfSense on a separate machine so the plan is to move that box to a Proxmox VM.

The migration was pretty painless. There are a few Unraid x Proxmox guides out there and although they're out of date the UI hasn't changed too much between versions so you can find the options/settings required.

I am getting some errors in the logs relating to the iGPU but functionality is fine. Hardware accelerated transcoding runs as expected. Only place I notice it is during boot, the Proxmox virtual console will freeze with an error about i915 memory allocation. The SSH server starts not long after so I'm only flying blind for a short while

 

[darkblade]

I've stuck with Unraid for a simpler solution. It's not as fast and responsive as my Xpenology setup, but the complete array isn't spinning 24/7, so is cheaper on electric. I note that the day to day VM usage and experience is better in Proxmox though.

 

[Stelly]

Is Proxmox any good? Been using VMware for a good while on premise, and then AWS for cloud, heard about Proxmox but never used it, looking at setting up some VMs to do some Kubernetes at home and was considering this but also have a vmware key as well... I guess there is a terraform plugin for proxmox as well?

Stelly

 

[thebennyboy]

Is Proxmox any good? Been using VMware for a good while on premise, and then AWS for cloud, heard about Proxmox but never used it, looking at setting up some VMs to do some Kubernetes at home and was considering this but also have a vmware key as well... I guess there is a terraform plugin for proxmox as well?

Stelly

We've currently got a project to migrate all of our VMware over to Proxmox in work, according to our infra team it almost shares feature parity with VMware now for a fraction of the cost. VMware's acquisition by Broadcom has got all the higher ups worried.