Recommended Motherboard / CPU / Memory for Unraid 6 in the UK

I have run Unraid since V3, and up to recently have been happy with my present setup of ASUS P5Q Deluxe / Celeron E1500 / 4GB RAM & 2 x Supermicro AOC SASLP-MV8 + 16 drives including parity & cache.

It seems to me that the development of V5 is at am impass, and not likely to progress beyond 5.05. This then forces us all to update to V6, which is fair enough, however it is clear that plugins are to be mainly developed using virtualisation.

The shame is that Unraid has always been sold on the basis that it could use low cost / low power / second hand equipment. However this new change of direction is likely to require a lot of us to update, and the price of Supermicro motherboards is making my head spin.

I am searching Ebay and are looking at a Supermicro X8SIA-F-O / Xeon X3430 and 8GB ECC RAM

However before I pull the trigger I would welcome any recommendations bearing in mind that I am in the UK where hardware is expensive. Prices on Newegg look good now that they ship to the UK however they don't sell every item outside of the US, and then you have to add on the customs duties & import charges on top

Why do you think you couldn't run a VM with your existing hardware?  As long as you're not doing passthrough, you should be just fine.

I have run esxi 5.0/5.1/5.5 on Asus P5QL and P5Q Pro Turbo, so your motherboard will work fine, with the exception, as Ramsay pointed out, of hardware passthrough.  The boards will support up to 16gb DDR2 sdram, and quad-core socket 775 cpu.

Thanks for your replies, I must admit that I know very little about virtualisation, but understand that Tom is suporting Xen only to start with.

I note that the BIOS for my motherboard has an option to enable virtualisation, but I am confused about the VT states, as the motherboard manual does not mention them. From reading through threads I assume that VT-X means that virtualisation can be enabled and that VT-D means that passthrough can be enabled too? So as such if I can only enable VT-X I can run VM's that do not need passthrough?

The problem is that it would appear that my processor (Celeron E1500) does not allow any VT states http://ark.intel.com/products/35100/Intel-Celeron-Processor-E1500-512K-Cache-2_20-GHz-800-MHz-FSB, so I will need a new processor.

Looking at the aforemention website it looks like I will need a LGA775 Quad Core processor, for example Q9550 http://ark.intel.com/products/33924/Intel-Core2-Quad-Processor-Q9550-12M-Cache-2_83-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB if I need both VT-X and VT-D?

Another question, even if I just change my processor, my motherboard will not support ECC RAM. I am not aware of having any data corruption problems to date, and use MD5 checksums on all files. However I am now at 21.5TB and that is a lot of data, I have read conflicting reports about the use of ECC RAM in a home environment, I can appreciate it's use in industry, but how important is it to us UnRaid users?

I ask because if I do choose to change my motherboard, it is something that I will be looking for, but it does not seem to be very well supported outside of expensive server grade motherboards.

Further to my above email, I have done some detective work, and have looked at a Q9300, which my motherboard will support, and offers both VT-X and VT-d.

However I understand that although this CPU will fit my motherboard and is supported by it's BIOS, I still need to ensure that the motherboard will support IOMMU.

This is where I draw a blank, the information from ASUS is sketchy. There is an option in BIOS to enable virtualisation, but I don't know if this is just VT-E, or both VT-E and VT-d and can find no mention of IOMMU in the motherboard manual. I understand that IOMMU is required for VT-d?

Does anyone have direct experience of the PQ5 Deluxe or similar who is able to advise? poto2 I understand that you have run esxi on P5QL and PQ5 Pro Turbo, have you used passthrough or are aware that these boards support VT-X, VT-d and IOMMU?

This is all very new to me, I am looking to buy a Q9300 and more RAM from Ebay, but don't want to waste my money if I can't get them to work properly i.e. allow VT-E, VT-d and IOMMU

Whats the difference (if any) between a board labelled as X8SIA-F and one labelled as X8SIA-F-O? Seen both being referenced. Are they one and the same? Is either (assuming there's differences) suitable for virtualisation? If so, at what level? Apologies for my questions but i'm trying to educate myself ...... slowly!

As you may have already realized Version 6 does not require you to run visualization. But, if you decide to visualize, for what application would you need to pass-thru hardware to the VM (a.k.a. VT-d)? Depending upon your needs you may find things will work nicely within an 8 GB landscape.

It has been stated there will continue to be support for plugins on Version 6 with a "real" PI manager within the stock GUI! That seems pretty good, however someone has to continue to maintain the plugins!

I happen to think you can do quite a lot with some of the older hardware so long as it supports VT-x.

On the matter of ECC memory, to me it's more of a question of how valuable is your data. You are already checking yours through MD5 checksums and that's a great idea! You have to decide if you have to have ECC. After all, your existing set-up (non-ECC) has got you to the 21GB state! You probably don't even want to think about a BACKUP system 

The Problem is that nobody knows what plugins (on a VM basis) will be developed in the future. I don't want to spend money on updating my present hardware, that may only support VT-x, and have to update again at a later date.

With regard to a PI manager within the GUI, I thought that Tom wants UnRaid to be as basic as can be, acting solely as an OS, with all plugins acting as VM's? This then will force a lot of us to update our hardware to support virtualisation so we can keep up to date with future releases?

I like the idea of Couch Potato, Sickbeard and Sabnzbd, however I guess this will need passthru to expose the NIC, which will require VT-d?

I like the idea of Couch Potato, Sickbeard and Sabnzbd, however I guess this will need passthru to expose the NIC, which will require VT-d?

unRAID Xen Edition provides a virtual bridge device called BR0 that your VM's will utilize to see the outside world. The configuration file for the VM contains a MAC address (you make it unique to each VM) and your router can then be set up to hand that a reserved IP address.

BTW, in my somewhat modest unRAID test-bed system running with 8GB of DDR2 I had/have SB and NZBGet running easily. NZBGet is said to be a better performer than SAB memory-wise. I don't have any experience with CP, but I'd say 8 is enough 

Thanks for your reply, I think would like, and I guess a lot users, is an idiot proof guide in how to setup and use UnRaid V6 with Xen, creating / using VM's.

I fully appreciate that is may be on Tom's radar and realise that V6 is only in beta, but lately with the inclusion of virtualisation it seems that things are speeding ahead with experienced users, to the determent of basic users like me, who mainly want to use UnRaid solely as a NAS device.

It seems no one wants to write one, at least with that title. There's one, something like "Conversation with Tom about Virtualization" on LimeTech's main  page. Also Tom2 has been writing some documentation. But I think you have to find the right thread and follow along with it. There's one on building an Ubuntu 12.04 server VM that's very good as a step-through.

I just couldn't "get" any of the ESX threads, it just didn't make any sense to me, even though I used ESX at work! But all our VM's were built from a SAN of storage.

When GrumpyButFun/SchoolBusDriver's VM threads came out I jumped in and luckily had some cobbled-together hardware to experiment with. IronicBadger's posts and blog are a big help as well, especially the ARCH VM!

From the outside it seems weird, but you'll soon get the A-HA moment and it all clicks. The umbrella Tom has given us with unRAID v6 is a fantastic start! Having the extra hardware and not having to worry about your existing data is best starting point and you can go pretty far on just a demo license using SNAP. I think this development system can be justified as a live second system to backup up the really important stuff.

Good Luck!

I followed the Ubuntu 12.04 instructions and they worked great for me.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=32733.0

Running Ubuntu will save you a lot of headaches to be honest,  there is way more documentation for doing stuff in Ubuntu than any other Linux distribution as far as I can tell.

Running Ubuntu will save you a lot of headaches to be honest,  there is way more documentation for doing stuff in Ubuntu than any other Linux distribution as far as I can tell.

Ubuntu or Centos/RHES and Fedora are all very well supported by community, howtos etc

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FYI. IOMMU is the same as vt-d but for AMD CPUs

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Thinking about what I have written, I am a little confused

I understand that UnRaid is to act as master, I guess like an OS, using Xen, which will allow other VM's to run under it, thus allowing applications like Linux to be run.

I further understand that Tom wants to keep UnRaid as "virgin" as possible to avoid possible corruption as with how plugins used to interact.

Where I am confused is how plugins are going to run under the new "extensions" tab. Are all plugins to be created as VM's under Xen and "hooked" into the new UnRaid OS somehow?

The reason that I ask is that my CPU (Celeron E1500) does not allow for any virtualisation, if all plugins are to run as VM's, I will have to upgrade it.

The concept is to keep the simplicity of what would be considered V5, unRAID without Xen. For that the plugin system would still be available. But there's never been a real plugin manager and Tom wants to provide that in V6.