Unraid on an R710 Part 1: Unraid

My first goal with this blog is to explain a bit about my homelab and why I made the choices for it that I did. Hopefully this series of posts benefits someone somewhere on the internet some day.

What is Unraid?

Unraid is a server operating system that can be installed directly onto server ("bare-metal") or desktop PC hardware. It's designed with three main features in mind. Primarily, it is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) controller. Additionally, Unraid contains an Application server leveraging Docker containers, and a Virtualization host (KVM) to run and manage Virtual Machines (VMs).

Some users run Unraid on their primary PC and use VMs for gaming or work or whatever. I use all three major features of Unraid in my homelab server setup, and I'll eventually go into detail about how I set up and use each of them.

Why Unraid?

Unraid does a lot of stuff that I find very convenient and useful for my homelab setup. Also, they have a great community forum, wiki, a really popular subreddit, and tons of quality community youtube content. It's not the best solution for all use cases, ultimately your software on your home machines is up to your preference, but it suits my needs well right now.

I initially tried a few hypervisors and even server operating systems on my R710. Ultimately, I didn't like the pricing or feature set or usability of any of them. I don't like being stuck in a VM to do everything, I don't like tools with features locked behind expensive paywalls and subscriptions, and I don't like having to use a command line or scripts to configure everything on my servers.

Of course, a lot of systems can handle drives in a RAID array for redundancy, but Unraid provides some pretty neat benefits, like...

You can add new drives of any size you want, given that your parity drive is at least as large as the new drive
Then Unraid Community Apps plugin is aaaaaamazing. Lots of contributors post plugins and docker containers to the Apps store, and they're super quick and easy to get running
Unraid can run on minimal equipment, if you want
Limetech has added some really great features to Unraid within the last few years, and I personally have a lot of faith in how they will continue to develop the software

Alternatives

There are tons of options out there for what software to run on your bare metal server. Some provide similar functionality to Unraid. Here are a few of the more popular ones (some of them are even free) that I've personally used or researched:

Or you can go with a server-oriented operating system

I've tried and used some of those options and settled on Unraid for my main server. Your preference is up to you, but the blog posts I'm writing in this series will specifically be about my experience with Unraid.

What's next?

Once you've selected Unraid for your server OS, and you're dead set on getting an R710 to run it - your next steps are:

Thanks for reading! Contact me or comment below if you have any questions or comments.