unRaid 6beta10

Nice to wake up this morning to a fresh build of unRaid. And easy to install as well. Previous updates required manual download and installation but this one shows up in the UI and it's just a matter of clicking the update link (and restarting the system).

This is not an earth-shaking release but it does have a couple of UI changes that are undocumented. Most noticeably, the links to the VM management tools are now moved to the main menu;

Secondly, the output of the newly-named 'System Devices' function under tools now includes discrete listings of USB and disk devices in addition to LSPCI output.

It would be nice if the updated was notified via the UI (rather than having to go into 'Plugins' and clicking the 'Check for Updates' button but otherwise this seems like steady progress.

UPDATE: Beta10a is now available - some misc fixes for Xen auto-start and other bits.

Thinking Outside The Box

Right now I've got my system stacked with expansion cards;

1x GPU for unRaid booting
3x GPUs for passing through to VMs
1x 2 port SATA expansion card
1x Octopus Tv tuner PCIe card
1x Octopus expansion tuner (no slot required)
1x PCI M-Audio Delta card

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 is a great board with 5x full length PCIe slots, a single 1x PCIe slot and a single PCI slot.

However, there's a problem: the 1x PCIe slot is tight up against a heatsink and any cards with any overhang at all simply won't fit. The ideal card in my setup to occupy this slot is the Octopus TV tuner but I can't get it in there. Therefore, I've got that card in a 4xspeed  full-length slot and a 2-port SATA expansion card in the 1x PCIe slot.

The Perils of Beta Testing

Regular viewers will be aware that I've been using beta versions of unRAID 6 to run multiple virtual machines on MediaServer8.

I haven't been cursing edge with the betas, mainly due to time constraints, plus I was stuck on beta5 for a while as there as a kernel issue in beta 6 that prevented it from recognising my Marvell motherboard SATA controlllers.

However, I have been updating regularly and most recently installed beta 7. This allowed me install BtrFS on my cache and install multiple drives to cache as well. Indeed I'd done this to play around with Docker which up to beta 7 required BtrFS. Frustratingly, this requirement was removed in Beta8 so my time was somewhat wasted setting that up, or so I thought.

Upgrading unRaid cache to btrfs

Having upgraded to unRaid 6 beta7, I've started having a look into the new Docker support. In unRaid, Docker needs to be installed on a btrfs volume or pool. Btrfs is a new filesystem to unRaid and supports 'copy on write' which enables Docker utilise minimal hard drive space. (see the Docker intro thread on unRaid forms for full details.)

My existing cache drive was a seagate 500GB and contained all my VM images and config files in a 'domains' directory. I copied these files off to a backup drive and set to work.

It was a good thing I made a backup as it soon became apparent that it would be very easy to make mistakes and wipe a lot of data!

unRaid 6beta7 Update

The next beta of unRaid is out about a week and today I got around to installing on MediaServer8. I'd been on beta5 for some time as there was a problem in beta6 that prevented the Marvell SATA controllers on my motherboard working. Happily, this is now fixed in beta7.

I'd made a few adjustments to my TVServer Win7 VM to reduce the RamDisk size. Happily, on reboot, the RamDisk re-instantiated and the timeshift user share for activated automagically. This had been once concern for me - how would the RamDisk behave on VM restarts. Perfectly, as it turns out.

So this is all good news. I can now start playing with the new Docker features of unRAID and start thinking about whether Xen is the correct VM platform as KVM is now an option for me.

Ramdisk for Timeshifting

I've added an extra 16GB of memory to MediaServer8 to now give a total of 32GB.

This has allowed me increase the assignment of memory to my Windows7 TVServer VM from 4GB to 16GB.

I want to experiment with using a ramdisk for timeshifting rather than a physical disk. A ramdisk is a virtual disk that exists only in memory. The advantage is that it's superfast, the disadvantage is that the contents are destroyed on each restart. However, this is not a big deal for timeshifting as there are only transient files stored.

For me, using a ramdisk rather than a physical disk also means that I can remove the 75GB Raptor I've assigned as a timeshift drive, freeing up the SATA port and physical bay for another storage drive. So all in all, it should be win-win.