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.
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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?
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
