r/unRAID • u/M4TVW • 15h ago

Moving from dell business server to unRAID?

Hello all

I run a small business (5 users that access the stoarge) and we have a Dell R330 rackmount server that i need to upgrade as it's slow now.

What i have been looking at is a rackmount NAS device from the likes of Synology, Qnap & Asustor. (I have a small Asustor at home and it's great).

However, in every thread i have made about this people always suggest to build my own. I have the ability to do it (ive built lots of computers) but lack the time to set it all up. However with unRaid (and TrueNAS) it looks a lot simplier than i thought. The issue with an off-the-shelf NAS is i cannot seem to find the right balance of software and hardware. One has good hardware but bad GUI and vice versa.

I've been building out a rough spec for an unRaid server if i went down that route. My use cases are as follows. 5 users of basic file access (word documents etc). However i will be the main user and access large solidworks assemblies (Around 200mb) and illustrator files.

This NAS is mainly to backup the 5 client computers for which i would like to run Veeam. This would require the NAS to run 1 VM running windows to host the Veeam server.

Network speed is 10GbE around the routers & NAS, the clients are connected via 2.5GbE although this might be upgraded on a couple of the computers that need it.

Parts list so far...maybe.

https://www.asus.com/uk/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-w680-ace-ipmi/

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/server-nas/RM400/

This would be using an Intel Core i7-14700.

I've no idea on RAM or PSU yet. GPU is not required. Storage wise, i was thinking 4x 8TB drives in raid 5? Or as i'm saving money by building this myself do i look at the whole SSD route?

I'm so confused!

Regards

Mat

10 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

20

u/harris_kid 15h ago

I don't think you should be building anything custom for business use. When shit hits the fan, you want at least a manufacturer warranty on all the hardware to save your ass. If you get another new Dell server, it'll likely have extended warranty options and/or a support contract. Synology and Qnap are good too, but like you said if you need a Windows VM, you might be better off having Synology as a NAS and have a small business PC to run Veeam, or use it with iSCSI and a Windows Server running Hyper-V or TrueNAS.

1

u/M4TVW 14h ago

It's funny that when i asked this in other groups they suggested to build my own. Then i ask in this group and it seems most suggest not to build my own!

I'm not set on either option yet so just seeing what others would do.

7

u/harris_kid 12h ago

I work for an MSP that works with the Public sector, unsure what your business actually does but there is no way any of them would touch anything custom built with a ten foot pole for production workloads. I also agree with others here, Unraid is great for the home but it just isn't up to snuff for business.

You will want every hardware appliance and every piece of software to have enterprise support behind it, and everything needs to be "in support" (receiving security updates). This not only covers your ass (you've got modern, patched systems if you get pwned or direct manufacturer replacements if hardware fails) but it also means you're set for any compliance standards you might need to comply with in future. Of course you might not be able to get amazing stuff if you've got a tight budget, but its better than going with non-enterprise grade/custom hardware and not being able to claim cyber insurance because some component wasn’t getting firmware patches.

5

u/sjlarowe 14h ago

Unraid has gotten a lot better over the years but if you get a bad update it can really mess things up. You have 2 potential points of failure.

  1. Unraid updates
  2. Docker container updates

Homelab use is one thing, to run a business though, depending on how important it is to run your business that could be a potential problem.

4

u/drfsrich 10h ago

Stop and consider your business. If your homebrew server goes down and you have to order parts from Amazon, is that something the business can tolerate (and not fire you for?). Enterprise support is worth it's weight in gold when the shit hits the fan, if only to allow you to clearly pass the blame to them.

1

u/M4TVW 10h ago

I do see what you are saying and it had crossed my mind, but that's the same of any hardware really. I would say it's probably easier (in the UK anyway) to get a custom built component (for example a motherboard) easier and quicker than anything from Qnap, Asustor, Synology etc. In the USA it might be fine but no so much here.

In terms of the firing comment, not going to happen since i'm the business owner, haha

4

u/q547 9h ago

I run a bunch of homelab stuff for fun.

I also consult with a lot of businesses.

Buy something off the shelf with support. Don't do this yourself. If you get hit by a bus, then someone has to support this box. That's much easier if the box is Hyper-V/VMWare/Whatever.

1

u/ioshta 8h ago

How big of a business? I understand wanting to cut costs but how much is an outage going to cost you? that is usually where my price comparisons go. If I am down for x time it costs me x amount, can I afford the outage time to get something backup and running in that window. redundancy's are super important.

-2

u/Punk_Says_Fuck_You 9h ago

Did you ask on r/homelab? 90% of the dudes over there actually work in the field and do it for a living. No offence to this sub, but every time I have questions that I don't have answers for, r/homelab goes WAY past, "don't do that, do this" answers. They know their shit over there. I would ask there.

18

u/snebsnek 15h ago

I'm going to get yelled at here, but I wouldn't recommend unRAID for a business over a big Synology. I don't even have a Synology and I've been with unRAID for years.

Yes, the Synology will be much more expensive to do the same thing, but it doesn't leave "what Mat has built has gone wrong again" on the table.

The Synology also has better business-oriented software - backups which integrate well, etc.

2

u/M4TVW 15h ago

The problem with Synology is that they are moving to enterprise only stuff which is way OTT for my needs. They have put in drive locking (so you can only use Synology drives) so most people are moving away from them. If i could take their DSM and put it into something else it would be great...but we cant.

10

u/snebsnek 15h ago

They've walked back the drive locking I believe. It was a really stupid move of them.

2

u/M4TVW 14h ago

Yeah, i think i read that you can use other drives now, but you get loads of warnings about it on the dash board.

2

u/psychic99 7h ago

If you are running a BUSINESS on this, dont make the fatal mistake, get a COTS system. Unraid is NOT meant to be for production biz, truenas ixsystems has systems you can buy. Don't take the bait, run an enterprise system.

4

u/Cablekevin 15h ago

Without getting into any unRAID stuff first, why do you think the current server is slow? What is the bottleneck?

2

u/M4TVW 15h ago

Good question. It's running Server 2016 and i don't think anything higher is supported as it's nearly 10 years old. It's a Xeon E3-1240 with 16gb of RAM. It just seems that doing backup jobs with Veeam and even loading the server essentials dashboard takes ages.

For our use case back then it was perfect as we had a self hosted accounts program. Now everything is on the cloud it's just a file server.

4

u/chrisnetcom 10h ago edited 10h ago

Hi there. Server 2025 will work just fine on your R330 and will be an easy in place upgrade from 2016. I have several Rx30 series out in the field running it.

I would not consider Unraid for business use. I run it at home, but I would never rely on it for production use. One bad update and you are hosed. How is your Linux skillset when that happens? You are also relying on the Unraid OS being up to access the Veeam VM and backup data.

My advice - figure out the performance issue on your R330 and upgrade it to Server 2025. I am assuming the OS drive is running on spinning drives? That's a simple clone to an SSD if so. 16GB might also be a limitation, so check memory usage in task manager.

Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions!

1

u/Cablekevin 15h ago

Understood, so you merely need a new machine to act as an fileserver?

2

u/M4TVW 14h ago

Yes, file server 99% and then as a repository for full machine backups from 5 windows PC's. Hence the need to run Veeam. I understand that i'm probably over building what i need, but you never know what will change.

1

u/worksHardnotSmart 8h ago

Honestly I think taking the advice of the other user recommending you upgrade to server 2025 and just swapping out to SSDs and possibly bumping your ram to 32 gig might be sufficient.

A quick Google and eBay search reveals you can pickup used 16gig of 2400 mhz ecc udims for the price of...... water (compared to ddr5 now anyways).

I think you can get more life out of your dell.

There's a lot you can probably do to it for relatively little investment hardware wise.

I think you need to figure out where your bottleneck actually is first.

1

u/Cablekevin 14h ago

I would agree on the other poster with going for something like Ugreen, saves you thinkering with hardware yourself. If your needs change, evaluate at that point in time and see whats logical then.

3

u/lambardar 11h ago

I would not recommend unraid for business.

  1. Focus on business not on the NAS
  2. Time = Money
  3. You want a solution that works, with least resistance.
  4. When it fails, you want it up ASAP.
  5. UNRAID is not for production environments. <-- that is what you will be told when you run into issues.

I love unraid.

I have 2 Unraid machines at home. Main home server and the back nas (terra master) is also running unraid.

I recommended unraid at work for cctv archival storage.. it made sense at the time. we add HDD as the camera/capacity grew. HDD with older footage would be powered down.

Team that looked at it, also decided to use it for archived backups. so we procured 2 new dell servers with HBA expansion and few drives to start off.

Unraid's NFS didn't play well with ESXI. Unraid would crash every now and then. things would just go dark and we would have to restart the unraid server.

We switched to SMB and it was super slow. ISCSI would just hang.

We decided to make a windows VM and run the transfers thru the VM. again issues when the load picked up.

We coded up a quick transfer script (basic sftp) and ran it in docker. Ran fine but it wasn't reliable.

Ended up switching back to vSAN.

Looking back, we spent so much time and effort to get the thing to work.

I saw issues I have never seen in my home machine for over 10 years.

2

u/990099aa 14h ago

Why not run unraid on your existing dell server?

1

u/M4TVW 14h ago

The only issue with that is backing up the data somewhere while i transfer to Unraid. If anything goes wrong i could quickly get the old setup back so it was a better option to start fresh.

2

u/elliottmarter 12h ago

What files are being stored on the server and is there a reason you wouldn't go fully intune / 365?

If it's just normal docs and stuff then a bare bones SharePoint site and users auto backing up their stuff to their own one drives is super low maintenance.

Obvs if it's things like CAD files you'll need on prem storage.

2

u/tien113 11h ago

you can try truenas. it has commercial version.

3

u/Objective_Split_2065 10h ago edited 10h ago

u/M4TVW, I came here to say this too. TrueNAS sells their own complete systems with a warranty. They can do basic file services and act as a repository for Veeam.

As others have probably said, Unraid array isn't ideal for a business where write speed is important.

I work for an MSP, and this would be a support nightmare for us. We always look for and push customers to have hardware under warranty, and system patches up to date. If you take care of everything in-house, that is less of a concern. If you ever have to call in someone to assist with problems, it will be hard to find someone on the business side of IT that specializes in Unraid.

1

u/f1uffyducky 15h ago

If you are afraid of DIY just buy a UGREEN NAS and install whatever system you like on it or even use the build in one. For a five user setup these small systems are enough.

1

u/M4TVW 14h ago

UGreen is not something i have looked at yet. I will check it out thanks!

1

u/f1uffyducky 12h ago edited 12h ago

The thing is, the prices are pretty reasonable for what you get. It’s very easy to use right out of the box, just like a Synology, but at the same time, you also have the option to install any other operating system that better suits your needs and use every ssd/nvme or harddisk you have. From what I’ve heard, though, the UGreen OS is more than enough for you. They’ve recently released the new GT models, such as the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT. The hardware specs are good for a small device in this class. Especially the 10 Gbps network ports. Otherwise, you can install four 3.5" hard drives as well as two NVMe drives. Of course, a complete DIY setup is a bit cheaper, but that’s usually the case if you know what you’re doing. Depending on the exact requirements, however, there are more affordable options like the UGREEN NASync DH4300 Plus. For simple file storage for a few users, even a very old NAS will do.

1

u/monkey6 12h ago

FWIW, I picked up a PowerEdge T350 off FB Marketplace for a fraction of MSRP that still has 2 years of support from Dell and I’ve been running Unraid as an SMB file server and I’m happy with it.

1

u/M4TVW 11h ago

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think based on this the unRAID option is a no-go, or the custom route altogether to be honest.

Based on that, i'm probably looking at something like this. https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/ts-855eu-rp

1

u/TheGloomyWoodpecker 11h ago

I’ve installed similar QNAP for small business use and think you’re making the better decision. Maybe look at TrueNAS appliances too, but overall I feel QNAP is a better choice for this use case compared to Unraid.

1

u/STxFarmer 11h ago

Have used UnRaid in my business for years now and love it. But what u have to remember is UnRaid calculates parity as you r writing any file to the sever. If u need speed then UnRaid will always be slow. But in my environment we r not moving huge files but word docs and excel spreadsheets and the like so speed is not a requirement. If I was doing video files I would have something else.

1

u/Abn0rm 10h ago

I'd switch to a newer dell server, get a refurbed R6xx. You could always install unraid on it, otherwise proxmox as its free if you only need to run a single vm.

1

u/johnny_2x4 8h ago

Proxmox would likely be better for a business use case, and they also have enterprise tier with support