Swapping unraid machines?

Hi all, I'm new here. Hoping to get a little help with this.

I've built two unraid 6 machines both running 6.1.9. One is at work, one is at home.

I want to take the home machine to work, and bring the work machine home, but swap all drive between the two machines so that current work data stays at work, and current home data stays at home.

Is it as simple as swapping everything, including the boot USBs, between machines and they should work? Please tell me yes!

I also have 3 VMs running at work, and 2 running at home that I want to keep in their respective locations, running off a single SSD "cache drive" in each location. I put "cache drive" in quotes because I'm writing direct to the array for all my shares, not to the SSD.

Specs of the machines in case it matters:

Work

Xeon W3550 3.07 Ghz w/ 24GB ram

currently 2x4TB WD Reds

It's an old HP Thinkstation s20 I picked up cheap.

Home

i5 3.3 Ghz w 12GB ram

currently 9TB mostly WD Reds

an old HP Z200 workstation I picked up cheap.

Thank you!

Tiwing

I can't comment on the VMs but for a straight UnRaid system all you need to do is move the array & cache Drives and UnRaid Flash drive. You may also have to move any additional SATA cards.

I would take a screen shot of the current drive assignments just in case. I recently went back and forth a couple times between 2 systems.

I'll let someone else chime in about VMs.

For the VMs make sure you swap the cache drives between machines.

unRAID is to a large extent hardware agnostic.  This makes it very easy to change hardware and keep your system intact from a data/configuration perspective.

If you are booting of the same USB stick and have the same drives then items like the motherboard, LAN card, etc should not matter as unRAID derives these dynamically on each boot.    Disks are recognised by their serial numbers so as long as they match the configuration information stored on the USB stick they should be seen even though they are now connected differently.

Screen shots taken of both machines.

This is great news, I'm so glad I switched from freenas! Thanks everyone. I'll report back after the switch is done with any gotchas along the way.

Cheers.

This is great news, I'm so glad I switched from freenas!

You are not the only one 

Done.

Almost.

It went really well - way better than I expected. The first priority was to get the work machine and point of sale up and running for tomorrow. All my stuff easily transferred between cases, and it booted right up. Shares were instantly available. One of my VMs didn't boot - this is the first gotcha. Since this was going into an i5 machine with 4 cores, and coming from an 8 core Xeon, gotcha #1: the VM was assigned to cores higher than existed in the new i5 machine. A quick edit, and it booted fine. There is an error in the logs when both the VMs boot which is a touch concerning, but .... for all I know it might have been there all along. I've never checked the logs. I think next weekend I'll copy the images and create new VMs natively on that machine and see if it works better. But for now, Point of Sale, and the other VM are fine.

A quick adjustment to dhcp on the router an the static IPs are exactly as they were.

The other machine - a little more interesting.

Before I decided to swap machines, I had added a new drive to the array that as of yet had absolutely nothing saved on it. I shouldn't have added it, but I did. This afternoon. duh. The Xeon machine's power supply has fewer power leads than I need, even when removing power from the optical drive. So, since I know there is nothing on the drive I simply did a new config and reassigned the drives with data (from the printouts I did earlier, thank you!). Parity is currently recalculating and all is good. Still, I'll be shopping for a new power supply and will probably move this into my old Antec case with 10 drive bays while I'm at it. So, gotcha #2: Make sure you have enough power leads, and enough SATA ports! (I'm fine on ports and was using a 4 port card anyhow)

So, all in all, pretty quick to make the change, and amazing that Unraid just simply works. It's a great night here in Ontario.

LOG in case anyone has comments:

2016-03-21 02:29:29.820+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.2.18, qemu version: 2.3.0

Domain id=2 is tainted: high-privileges

Domain id=2 is tainted: host-cpu

char device redirected to /dev/pts/1 (label charserial0)

Cheers