Unraid alternatives with ZFS and VM and Docker and Native storage access

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Hi, I know asking for Unraid alternatives is an open ended question, but I'm interested in opinions.

Over the years I've switched from hardware RAID, and Hyper-V and VM's, to Docker in an Ubuntu VM on Hyper-V, to IT mode HBA's and Unraid.
Now I'm getting frustrated with poor SMB performance caused by Unraid's FUSE, and the fragile cache drive caused by BTRFS, and the appeal of the Unraid app store has worn thin, as I can do more with docker compose or Portainer.

If I could get native ZFS support in Unraid, that would be pretty sweet, but the ZFS plugin is far from native.
An alternative is a Proxmox UX for VM management, and a FreeNAS UX for ZFS and share management, and a Portainer UX for Docker management.

I understand the Docker in VM solutions (no Docker on BSD) all use NFS for storage access, but I want direct mapped storage to Docker, unless there is some magic I don't know about that gives localhost NFS similar performance to SAS3.

And did I mention I'd like all this in one actively well maintained distribution.

Options and opinions?
 
Thanks, that setup has many moving parts, and I still don't quite get the Proxmox with HBA passthrough to Ubuntu running Docker and ZFS?
I assume it is to get ZFS to Docker, instead of storage backed mount points in proxmox or 9p virtio in KVM?

If Proxmox or FreeNAS just natively ran Docker, I'd be a happy camper.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Proxmox is Debian based is I am sure it can run docker. But there is no interface to manage it. Cli only.
For me , Unraid only held interest because of ability to expand drives one at a time independant of size. But many other things were difficult to say the least. As my setup is not very demanding, I have been running Proxmox with zfs managing the pools by hand. I know that now Proxmox has some ui support but still somethings are easier to cli. Since I run containers only I just bind mount the pools into containers and deal with data there.
Again my setup is simple. It is a basic media storage and server.
I run lxc with jdownloader with throuaway pool where all my downloads go.
I run lxc with jellyfin for media server.
I run lxc with unify controller
And plan to have several lxc with Coach potato /sonar etc...
To ease media management. I don't download much but it would be helpful to have an automated media management in place so I do not have to do it manually things like renaming and moving files to media library.
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
2,515
650
113
Proxmox is Debian based is I am sure it can run docker. But there is no interface to manage it. Cli only.
For me , Unraid only held interest because of ability to expand drives one at a time independant of size. But many other things were difficult to say the least. As my setup is not very demanding, I have been running Proxmox with zfs managing the pools by hand. I know that now Proxmox has some ui support but still somethings are easier to cli. Since I run containers only I just bind mount the pools into containers and deal with data there.
Again my setup is simple. It is a basic media storage and server.
I run lxc with jdownloader with throuaway pool where all my downloads go.
I run lxc with jellyfin for media server.
I run lxc with unify controller
And plan to have several lxc with Coach potato /sonar etc...
To ease media management. I don't download much but it would be helpful to have an automated media management in place so I do not have to do it manually things like renaming and moving files to media library.
I'm curious as to what kind of issues you had when setting up Unraid the first time.

As for alternative solutions, what I found in my journey's looking for alternatives is that even though I thought "hey I don't need a webui for this", once I didn't have it anymore I missed having a single WebUI for all accessing all things related to my server. That single user interface to access my storage, docker containers, vm's, scheduled scripts, etc. is what I have not been able to find anywhere else.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Unfortunately you will not find this type of solution outside of Unraid or maybe freenas setup. Please understand that I never used freenas, just researched it when I was setting up my server. I am not too good with docker and I prefer mainstream Linux to bsd so I did not choose fn, also at the time zfs was a mistery to me so that also played a role.
I did not have much trouble with Unraid.
I run a free version for almost a year, but when I decided to expand my setup a few questions arised that steard me away form Unraid into alternative solution that worked for me.

I did not like the licencing schema.
Tying the license to a USB key is not for me. I am not a business and do not have a budget to get spare keys. As well as having licence limited to number of drives I use.
Also , not sure how it is now but update upgrade process was a drugg. Using any other file system was not supported. Later when I learned that they support btrfs I was tempted to take another look but by that time I was already running my zfs Proxmox setup and just let it go.
 

Navy_BOFH

Active Member
Aug 2, 2013
179
74
28
Proxmox is Debian based is I am sure it can run docker. But there is no interface to manage it. Cli only.
Luckily you can run Docker right on the Proxmox OS - and STH created a guide that also showed installing Portainer with it. Only thing I had to do different was then set Portainer to automatically start between host reboots otherwise Docker would run and your Web UI would be gone.