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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ahOXQM4416Q
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=M3pKprTdNqQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
