UNRAID Setup Guide 2022. PLUS! Intro to Docker Apps and VM's!

hey guys welcome to elevated systems i'm your host cj and today we're going to finish the 32 core threadripper unraid server build by installing and setting up onraid now if you're interested in this desktop server home servers in general you can check out my last video where i built this system and outlined many of the principles to consider when building or planning a home server there's a link in the description below but today the agenda is to download unraid set up the unraid boot usb drive outline some of the uefi settings launch the unraid server learn how to access the server remotely and before we set anything up we'll test the system memory and drives to ensure there are no actual or potential problems before we put data on the system once the tests are complete we'll set up the network attached storage pool and network shares add users to the server map the network shares to both my pc and mac i'll demonstrate how to install containerized apps and if there's time of virtual desktop and finally i'll go over the many use cases i have planned for this server to answer the question why bother that's the plan let's execute it's the money okay let's get rolling with the server setup and in the list of possible operating systems i could go with for my server i'm going with unraid to answer the question why first it comes down to my storage drives i have a mix of eight and four terabyte hard drives and one terabyte nvme ssds i also want the flexibility to expand the nas as needed those are a couple of the strong points of unraid and secondly i've just never ran unraid so it's a new playground to explore i'll use the trial key if i don't like it i'll switch to truna scale maybe okay let's get unraid so open a web browser and navigate to unraid.net click download and download the usb creator tool for mac or for windows now if you're not aware unraid installs 2 and boots from a usb thumb drive the two requirements are it needs to be between 2 and 32 gigabytes and it must contain a globally unique identifier i'm using a 16 gigabyte sandisk cruiser fit which i'll plug into my laptop now and launch the unraid flash creator tool in step 1 i'll select the latest stable version of unraid which today is 6.10.2 and i'll click customize allowing me to name my server i'm going to keep the network mode to dhcp and allow my router to sign an ip address and i'm going to click allow you if i boot because my like most modern consumer motherboards runs a uefi bios if you have an older motherboard or you have csm compatibility mold enabled you don't need to click this so you can allow for legacy bios booting in part 2 i'll select my sandisk usd and then click right that process will take a couple of minutes and once done i can eject the usb and plug it into my unraid server for this next part you'll need a monitor and a keyboard connected to do the uefi bio settings and memory testing and initial unrate boot first thing is to power on the server and enter the uefi menu for me i'll just hit delete when prompted to do that and i'm in now of course every bios is different but the thing you will need to find in insurers enabled are first virtualization in my asus amd motherboard it's under advanced cpu configuration and it's called svm mode some intel motherboards call it vtx and io mmu may be a separate setting that will need to be enabled too as you get to know your server you may set other optional settings like i've set the ecc scrub rate enabled energy saving features and customize the cpu fan curve but what you need to do is ensure the unraid flash drive is the default boot device once that's done save and reset and on reboot you should be met with this menu now before we even start the server select the bottom memtest 86 and run the test this will run a comprehensive stability test on your server ram and it takes several hours it took over nine hours on my systems but once the test is complete hopefully you ran past if not you'll need to adjust the settings start by disabling xmp or docp if it's enabled you'll definitely don't want unstable memory in the server especially as unraid runs completely in ram if it passed go ahead and reboot your server and you should be greeted with this menu again and this time select the first option to start unraid a lot of text will scroll by and if yours ends with this being the server name you selected of course write down the ipv4 ip address which for me is 10.0.0.183 and that's it the server is now running and i can access it from any other system on my network so on my laptop i'll open a web browser and in the address bar type in the ip address for my server you should land here where you can set a root password for your server next you'll either need to purchase an unrated license the current pricing runs from 59 for six drives 89 for 12 or 129 for unlimited drives or like i'm doing you can go with the trial next this is optional but i went ahead and signed up for the my server beta mostly just to check it out but with that out of the way we're in the main page of the server interface and here we can create our array but before we do that i want to test all the disks to make sure there are no problems before i build the array and move my data to it so if i scroll to the bottom of the page i can see all the disks attached to the server click on the device name click the self test tab and then next to smart extended self test click start this will run the standard smart self test but also check the surface of the entire disk so it'll take time but again better to figure out if there's a problem now and as a matter of fact shortly after starting the test on all my spinning discs i discovered a problem in that my 8 terabyte wd red drives were getting pretty hot i installed them in the basement drive tray where they're sandwiched together and don't get much airflow that was an oversight on my part so i stopped the test and rearranged my drives after moving the larger and hotter drives to the top of the case and restarting the test they didn't pass 40 degrees and after about 12 hours the test was done and completed without error for all of my drives now that we know our ram and drives are stable we can build the array on the main page i'll first select my parody drive this should be the largest disk available so i'll select one of my eight terabyte disks the parity drive will hold information needed to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure and will not be included in the total amount of storage space on your array a single parity drive will protect from a single drive failure and two parity drives will protect from two simultaneous drive failures as i only have six mechanical drives in my array i'll just go with a single parity disk if i had eight or more drives i'd probably go with double parity now i can select the disks for the array and disk one will be the one terabyte samsung nvme drive then my other eight terabyte drive disks three through six are my seagate four terabyte drives next under pool devices i'll click add pool to create my cache pool the cache pool is where data transferred to the nas is initially set and later moved to the array this is done for speed as cache drives are typically faster ssds i have two devices to use as cache drives which are the intel nvme drives once i have all my array and pool devices selected i can start the array and as soon as i do the server starts building the parity however you notice that all the disks are unmountable because they need to be formatted which i'll do now and like the warning says here this will erase any data that is on those disks the formatting took about eight minutes and now my array devices are xfs formatted and the cache pool is butter fs but you notice that the two one terabyte cache nvm drives are pulled in what is essentially a raid one config so i only have one terabyte of available cache base now this is the recommended way to do this that way if one of your cash drive fails before the data is moved to the array you won't lose any data but i want all two terabytes so i'm gonna rebalance the cash pool in a raid 0 config now i have the space but no redundancy so if just one drive fails i lose all the data on both drives i'm okay with this as i'll never delete my original data source until the data is moved to the array but you'll want to definitely weigh your options accordingly okay the unraid storage array is all set up but the parity is still being built so i'm going to wait until that's finished before i do anything else which flash forward took over 15 hours but now i have a 24.8 terabyte storage array with a 2 terabyte cache but in order to use the nas i need to create shares or file systems i'll be able to access from other devices on my network so in the shares tab click add share name the share and the only other settings i'll change are select yes i want to use the cache pool for this share and i will exclude disk 1 the samsung nvme from the share so none of the data added to this year will be stored on that ssd i'll be creating a second share that uses just this ssd but i'll explain that later but now our first share is added but i don't always want to access my map shares as the root user so click on the users tab and let's add a user i'll add me and give me a password and add and now i have a new user who can access shares but not affect the server overall but now i need to set up access to share so back to the share tab and click on the share i just created and at the bottom in the security settings first i want to ensure the share is visible to the network so change export to yes and then i'll change the security from public to secure when i click apply a user access menu appears and here i can assign the type of access to all the users on the server for now that's just me so i'll give myself read and write access to the share if you select private as the security type you'll also have the option to give users no access to the share at all all right now that the server is set up we have a share and a user to access them so now we need to add that share to other computers on the network so let's do that for both windows and mac first for windows open your file explorer click on this pc and either click the three dots in the menu or right click on my pc and select map network drive here you can select drive letter and the share folder which will be backslash backslash server ip or name backslash and the share name select connect using different credentials and finish and then enter the credentials and ok and there is your empty network attached drive now i can make directories or add files i'll make a couple of folders and if i go back to the server we can see those folders are reflected in the share for mac open finder and the first option i have is to click network click on the server and then click connect as enter my user credentials and now i have access to all the shares on the server that user cj has permission to access or i can map individual shares by opening finder hitting command k on the keyboard to bring up the connect to server dialog enter share name and click connect now if you haven't already logged into the server like i did then you'll need to enter your user credentials and then have the option to save them to your keychain and now you have the share under your network locations to ensure you reconnect to the server with every reboot open system preferences and in users and groups click login items tab and then drag that folder into the login items and that's it you have a really flexible nas up and running but that's only part of what an unraid server is capable of now i'm gonna demonstrate a couple more functions the server is capable of these won't be step-by-step guides to follow along with but will give you a better idea of the endless possibilities of having your own server so the first thing i'll demonstrate is how to install and use a containerized or docker app and it's so simple and unraid first click the apps tab and click install to install the community applications plugin once installed you have a multitude of applications to choose from i'm going to use my server to automate the process of transcoding my footage and sorting it to the nas so i'll search for an app called handbrake and now i can just click install and configure the app this is where the folders i created earlier come in i'll select the input folder as my watch folder and the output folder as my output once it's installed i can launch the handbrake web ui and configure and save a custom preset that will apply to all media handbraking once i go back to the app setting and input that preset now handbrake will watch that input folder and once i transfer media files to it handbrake will begin transcoding them into the output folder you can see all the cpu cores spinning up here and handbrake is working on the job now i've just completely automated the process i've had to do manually i can just dump all the b-roll footage from my camera drives to the nas and let it do the work there are also apps i can use to take the files from the output folder and sort them into their permanent folders on the nas so that was one way to drastically save drive space without drastically sacrificing quality but not all the footage i produce is compatible with handbrake so how can i do the same thing with my blackmagic raw footage well i use adobe media encoder for that unfortunately there's no docker app for a media encoder however i can install a virtual operating system on the server so let's install a windows 10 virtual machine on the server first i'll need to download the windows 10 installation iso and place it in the iso share i'll also need to download the latest virtual drivers for window which is easy to do in the vm manager and settings now in the vm tab click add select windows 10 and assign it some cpu cores memory and disk space locate the installation iso and drivers and click create this will launch a new window where you'll go through essentially the same steps as installing windows on a bare metal pc you'll just need to locate install some drivers along the way once it's installed you'll have a functional windows operating system running virtually on your server there are a few steps to take to get it running smoothly like installing more drivers but from here i can map drives just like i did on my laptop and download and install media encoder i'm not going to take you through all that at this point it's no different from installing it and setting it up with watch folders and encoding presets than it is on a bare metal pc but now it'll just sit on the server and do the work i needed to do in the background and i can access it from any computer on my network even my macs so that's just two ways i can use this server but of course for those who wonder why bother why do you need such a high spec server well those are fair questions most people don't need a server like this but i'll be doing so much more first i'll be installing plex and moving my media library to the server and i'll offload the plex transcoding to the gpu i'll be installing lan cache to centralize my steam epic blizzards all my game libraries this will allow just the server to get updates to my game libraries and then all the other gaming pcs in the house can pull the updates from the server saving on the 1.2 terabyte internet band limits i have thanks infiniti i'll run sync things which i can set up on all the families computers and even phones and that will automatically backup their data to the nas and then i can run rclone that will push that data from the server to my cloud backup service i'll be setting up a direct 10 gigabit connection from the server to my mac studio and like i mentioned of the many shares i'll set up one would just use the fast nvme ssd that'll hold all my stock media that i regularly access so i can edit directly from the server without having to move those media files and like i said in the beginning it's a playground i could quickly and easily spin up virtual machines to explore and test different operating systems it's definitely robust and powerful enough to spin up a gaming vm well next multiple gaming vms not that i really plan to but i am interested in maybe trying to spin up a steam os vm but first i need to get my data off all the portable drives it's currently sitting on that's going to take time but what would you use a home server for and what might you like to see more detailed info on i was thinking maybe of doing a five minute tutorial series on some of those things i just mentioned i'm not sure youtube doesn't like when you break from your mold let me know in the comments and of course spread the love with the like and maybe consider subscribing for a wide assortment of tech related content hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Elevated Systems

Views: 150,327

Keywords: unraid setup, Home Server 2022, Unraid, unraid 6.10, unraid tutorial, docker apps, virtual machine, Run Windows on Unraid, unraid gpu passthrough nvidia

Id: huCE4jtXOjQ

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022