UNRAID First Impressions - MY NEW HOME SERVER HYPERVISOR???

if you're in home labs you fall into one of three categories you've either found the hypervisor of your choice you're either looking for the hypervisor you want to use or you've been laid before luckily i'm in the category one i'm a proxmox user now wait a second isn't this video about unread yes i'm always down to try new things i'll try anything twice so when a lot of people suggested i try unread as my hypervisor i went for it this was three weeks ago and i've been using it on and off since and i have some thoughts on it some good some not so good but overall did unraid overseed proxmox as my new hypervisor let's find out [Music] so what is unread unread is hypervisor os just like all the others but it's built on linux so you get all the cool linux features and docker containers and whatnot that you're used to on other linux based hypervisors there are two distinct differences though with unread that aren't so common on other hypervisors one being that it runs solely off of a usb stick and it's kind of convenient and not so convenient at times but it works second is that it's not free for any tier so a lot of hypervisors have a free tier and then more of a corporate or business level paid tier unraid doesn't have any free tier at all they do have a 30-day trial which is what i'm on but the prices are as follows the prices are based solely off of how many disk drives you want to connect to your system so it's sixty dollars if you have six or less disks ninety dollars if you have twelve and a hundred thirty dollars for unlimited and you're paying this price per usb stick so that's per device you want to install on raid on so those are the main things that separate unraid from other hypervisors now obviously there's a lot more differences but those are the main ones so let's jump into unread and take a look at some things and we'll walk through what i like about it and what i don't really like about it all right so we're in the dashboard now and you can see it's a very very clean interface there's a lot of good information directly on the dashboard from here you can control your actual system whether you want to shut it down restart it here it'll show your running docker containers your virtual machines any shares that you have users the status of your array and all the disks in it as well as some hardware information about your system in general so yeah i'm not going to cover that a lot you guys can see it's clean it's very interactive you can interact with your vms your containers your users and whatnot super intuitive that's one of the good things i like about unread it's very clean and very easy to use and you'll see that as a common theme as i talk about unraid and all the different features so let's go over here next into the main tab which is going to be our array or our storage now unread uses the xfs or fs file systems which are going to differ heavily from something like true nas if you're running a dedicated nas system over there which is running zfs now there are talks i think of zfs coming to unrate in the future but as of right now it's not officially supported so you're getting xfs or butter fs which has its advantages so with this you have a single array now you're probably thinking wait what i want to be able to divide up you know different partitions for different things how can i do that all in one array we'll get there it's pretty cool how it's done but the cool thing about unraid and the file systems it uses is that you can take pretty much any drives you have laying around throw them all at your unread server and it will combine them into one big array of data so it's convenient if you have just a bunch of hard drives like i do literally sitting over there doing nothing that you can't pair with the zfs system because it kind of requires matching drives to perform correctly so so super convenient to be able to mismatch drives throw them in there if you need more storage you can stop the array throw another hard drive in boot it back up and you're good to go the only real stipulation here is that you do have to have a parity drive in your array which prevents against data loss and this parity drive has to be equal or larger than the size of the next largest drive in your data pool so for example if we look at mine you can see i'm running four two terabyte hard drives as well as a 256 gigabyte ssd all in the same array with my parity drive being one of those two terabyte hard drives now i can't use my 256 gigabyte as the parity drive obviously because it's not as big as the next biggest drive which is two terabytes you guys understand numbers and just like the dashboard it's super intuitive super easy to navigate if you want to go down and stop the array to make some modifications do that over here you can perform parity checks you can spin them down gracefully if you want to do that shut down the array do whatever you want from there you can also go over here and view the file systems on the specific disks if you want so that's super convenient you can click on there and you can see oh what's in the specific disk and you can see how much space is used you can see the speed that it's being written to now i think i have to change that where do i change that there's a view for it there we go so now i can see the real time speed that these disks are being rewritten read and written to now you can add a cache disk to your array if you want to speed it up and what it does is it takes all the data that it needs to write to your storage caches it in your cache array and then does all the parity checks later on down the road so now you are getting faster speeds but you are risking your data because while it's waiting to write that parity data it's being stored in that drive and if that cash drive fails then you lose your data so if you want to sound like an edgy bad boy when you're at the bar just go up to a girl and tell them you run a cash disk and unread works every time so yeah storage with unrate is super convenient but i still like shernas and zfs i like the speed better and the ability to customize my pools and dedicated cash for each pool so tomato potato so next let's go into shares and it's pretty straightforward all of it's done in smb so whatever system you're using you can connect to these shares there are some default ones that are here when you initially install unread but you can add your own obviously and super easy go to share give it a name any comments uh allocation method this is super cool you can click over here if you ever have any questions i actually had to learn that on stream it took me like a couple of hours before someone pointed out uh click over there if you want to know more information so allocation method there's three different ones there's high water fill up and most free the most common ones high water you can read through them i assume you guys can read i'm not going to go over all of them but it's pretty cool how you can differentiate how you want data to be stored on each disk for each share specify the space split level that's another way of customizing how your data is stored in your array remember how i said in your array you have all your disks there but there is further customization if you want to specify which specific disks and how you want to store it to the array here's their settings so split level again you guys can read you can click over here and it'll discuss everything about it but essentially it's saying if i store a file i want all the children file to be in the same disk or i want the first two children to be in the same disk and you can kind of decide how you want to go from there but i leave it to automatically because i don't care about children and even further customization you can specify exactly which disks you want to include so if i only wanted to go to a specific disk i can specify that here on the flip side if i wanted to go to all of them except a specific disk i can specify that here and the benefit of that is that if i add disks down the road these settings will kind of stick so if it's all then it'll still use all of them even if more of them are added if i've excluded the disk it'll still exclude that one even if more added you guys get the picture you're so smart users probably the most basic tab it's where you create and edit users it's also where you specify the user's permissions to share so for example on this test user you can go in change the password delete them give them a nice profile pic and down here you can specify what accesses they have to shares and you can see we have two shares that are available the isos one which comes by default and it is public so i obviously have read and write access and plex data that was the one i created for my plex container it is private so by default i have no access but if i want to change that it's super easy click here and specify which access you want apply boom done that easy settings this is where you'll find settings i'm not going to go over all of them that would take a billion years but a couple of cool ones i want to talk about are cpu pinning this will list all your vms and containers and other processes and you can specify exactly which cpu cores or threads you want those services to run on so for example if you have three major services that you want to separate so that they're not stepping on each other's toes for cpu resources you can make sure that they're allocated to completely different threads and cores which is a really really cool feature that i like about unread that i wish they would integrate in some other hypervisors another one let's go over to disk settings this is where you can specify a whole bunch of nerdy ass about your disks more importantly the default file system so xfs butterfs resurfs and if you want them to be encrypted as well so yeah here's where you'll find a bunch of disk settings another cool one is ups settings and no this isn't the sexy man that delivers your cat food this is a uninterruptible power supply so if you have a ups connected to your server which i hope you do that supports communicating via usb then you can control a lot of the functionality of that ups via this gui here which is super cool feature that i haven't gotten to yet but i've only been testing this it's not by all my other power supplies so i'll get there eventually here you'll see network services settings where like i said you have default smb sharing but you can set up nfs as well as ftp and below that we have scheduler and what this is is scheduling parity checks on your array to make sure it's healthy make sure everything is aligned if there's parody issues that'll correct them so you're going to want to have that scheduled if you're running this in production or even test obviously but i'm running this in super test mode right now so i kind of disabled it i'd recommend doing them at least monthly if you're going to do it so make sure that is set here all right so next let's get into plugins and plugins are essentially what they sound like they're plugins for your unread server that makes interacting with it hopefully better so two of the most common ones that i've seen are the community applications plugin which you install here which gives you access to all the docker containers and applications created by the community so you're going to want to go ahead and install that unless you're some super duper introvert and fixed common problems is a cool one that gives you an annoying pop-up whenever uh this plug-in detects common errors on your system and lets you fix them so yeah super easy to install install give it the url press install bottom docker this is where all your containers that you install will live so in here you can see it's again a nice simple ui that you have access to control your docker containers you can go in see information about them modify them do whatever you want to them whatever you want obviously you can go in and add containers pretty standard information you have here to enter it's not docker compose i wish they did have a native docker compose kind of gui section similar to how poor taner does but if you don't like how unraid handles docker you can install your own docker orchestrator you can install rancher you can style portainer you can install whatever you want so this will get the job done but if you want something else you're free to use it next we'll go into vms and it's vms virtual machines now it's pretty intuitive to create a vm in unraid i would say it's probably the best out of the hypervisors that i've used so to create a vm you go in here you click add depending on which type of vm you want to add you go in here and it gives you kind of some default information for that virtual machine depending on what you pick so if we go with ubuntu you can go in and give it a name description here's where you can specify which threads or cores you want to allocate to that vm initial memory max memory if you allow ballooning on it to go up and down in memory machine type bios type a whole bunch of settings here now down here in primary disk now we're going to backtrack a little bit to my array and you're probably wondering why i have an ssd in my array and not as a cache disk and that is because i want to run all my vms specifically on that ssd due to the high iops on a vm currently reading and writing to it doing that in a bare metal kind of hdd array definitely slows it down and yes i tested it so it's really cool primary vdisk location here's where you can specify exactly which disk you want i would do that to my 256 gigabyte ssd so here's where i specified how much space i wanted to allocate to it a whole bunch of other information down here really cool feature of unraid and vm's graphics card you can specify a graphics card that you want to directly pass through super easy here you can see it's detecting my gt 1030 that i could easily pass through but i'm not going to do that right now leave it at vnc network information any sound card that you want to pass through as well and click create super duper easy then you can access it you just click the icon and you can start stop it and remote into it now of course i had to do a freaking update yeah but here you go windows 10. cool all right apps one of the major features of why people love unraid so much you have a plethora of apps to choose from and they're super easy to install they have it categorized if you want to browse by specific categories you can browse by all apps you can search for any apps you want the only thing i will knock about this is that i would think by default when you search or when you're just browsing the officially supported apps would be at the top of the list but um it doesn't seem like that's the case so the one i have installed for plex is the official one and it's kind of three rows down so nitpicking here you can also sort it by downloads which is cool so if you do that you get more of the official releases at the top so i wish that was the default behavior but oh well so not only is it really easy to browse search for and install these apps the community is super helpful when i tweeted out that i was interested in trying out unrate i got a whole bunch of people telling me to come over to the the forums or join discords and they'd be willing to help so that's a welcomed change to anytime you're looking to do something in linux and some dude who's a keyboard warrior from their mom's basement is threatening you um because you don't know how to do some obscure uh cli command so props to the unread community but yeah for example if i wanted to install file browser search it boom the official one go over here click install and just like any docker container it's going to ask for some parameters you can fill those out then you literally just click apply it's going to install and it'll run in your docker tab last but not least tools now all this is pretty much the boring diagnostic stuff but there's one thing i really want to cover over here and that is system devices now when you're creating a virtual machine and you want to pass through a device or pci device or what have you and you click the drop down and you don't see it there that's because you have to go over here and tell the host system that you want to detach it from the host and allow it to be able to pass through to a virtual machine now if we scroll down you can see i do have a wi-fi network adapter that i have checked and it is detached from the host so i can pass that through to any vm that i want but if you're scrolling through and you see any other devices that you want to attach to a virtual machine you would simply click them and then go down here and click bind selected to vfio at boot then you're going to have to reboot it's going to detach it from the host and allow you to pass that through to a virtual machine so once you do that you are pretty much set up and ready to go and unraid and that is my setup and i know there's a whole lot more to unread i know there's a whole lot more cool stuff you can do i know i didn't cover everything but i don't have the patience or the willpower to make a five hour long video so so overall i do think unraid is an amazing hypervisor especially for beginners it's super clean it's super easy to use it's super intuitive for that reason i would strongly recommend it to anybody looking to start a real home server for the first time now i know it's not free so it's hard to recommend because if you spend 30 days with the trial setting up your entire home server just the way you like it you're probably not going to want to change to something else which i guess is a good business move but if you don't mind the cost then i would strongly recommend it but i'd be curious to know what are you running on your home server are you running on raid are you running proxmox are you running trueness are you running all of them let me know down in the comments so that's all i have for you today if you like the video please drop a like if you like content like this please consider subscribing thank you so much for watching i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 5,190

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Id: KJyYhN76D8o

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021