I am running a second unraid server on proxmox. Just passed through the USB and LSI HBA. Using a cache drive with a virtual disk supplied via proxmox. Working like a charm. 10 gbe network works at full speed straight through proxmox as well. HDD array with currently four drives including 1 disk parity. Performance pretty much like my bare metal unraid server.

Proxmox is a proper hypervisor and a lot more capable and flexible than unraid (not shitting on unraid, I like it a lot and even run a proxmox guest on it). If you need a wide range of vm features, your route sounds sensible to me.

Ah yeah, I am running proxmox on a Ryzen 3700x with 128gb ram. The guest is getting 6 cores and 8gb (with balooning), but if you only use unraid as a NAS, that’s probably overkill as well. Unraid is really not very resource hungry.

I haven't used these yet. If I have Proxmox as Hypervisor and Unraid running as a VM, do I pass all the hard drives through to Unraid?

If I run other VMs, can they see the Unraid drives / partitions?

I do also run unRAID under proxmox for a couple of weeks. I have been running it baremetal for two years but I needed better VM management. And I don't think that unRAId needs all the cores. I left it with 6c and 12 gb ram but I will lower it step by step.

It has an Lsi controller passed through with all the storage.

Y created a virtual bridge and all the VMs that need connections to unRAID they do it through that and do it blazing fast. Even the backups of the proxmox VMs goes to an unRAID share through that interface

I must say that I find unRAID more snappy than when it was baremetal. So for me I will continue like this

Also if proxmox fails, you still can run your Nas booting from the USB.

I was thinking about doing this myself. I like unRAID and I've been running it for years on multiple servers, but I am not a fan of the VM management or the way Dockers are handled in some instances. Proxmox is amazing and it gives me more freedom. What i may do is run Proxmox on one server and unRAID without any dockers on another just for the storage capabilities.

Would love to hear a little bit more about this. I am looking at doing this over Christmas to new years, and just want unraid for storage. I would like to have all my media stored on unraid and a separate VM manage plex and media library. Is this possible?

It's posible. I'm running that setup and have no problems. Just created a unraid vm and passed thru my unraid usb boot drive and my drives.

Best part about going this route is you can take advantage of the better file system zfs.

I'm considering this for the following reason ... I have HP 705 G2 Mini computer running pfSense and it consumes about 30W. If my desktop was running Proxmox, I could have unRAID and a pfSense container all in one machine and I bet I'd save at least 25W.

I know I had an issue in the past when running pfSense within Proxmox when it rebooted and the switch not picking up the right MAC address so I'd have to reboot the router, switch, and Proxmox in some specific order ... I did fix this somehow but now I can't remember how exactly I did that in some settings somewhere.

Did the same thing with vmware for a while. VMware has a weird issue where it would not but from USB devices but you can work around that with an ISO. Ran fine, used 2 9211-8i HBAs. One for the front backplane with all the unRaid drives and a second for the rear backplane for VMware. Eventually went back to bare metal and it was super simple and never lost anything through the whole process.

As long as the VM has dedicated drives (not virtual disks) it should be ok. I can't think of any other caveats.