The Unraid Setup (Beginner)
Unraid is the friendliest on-ramp I know: boot from a tiny USB, manage an elastic array of mismatched disks, and add pools for speed. This Unraid path is the gentle slope. It gets Builders from zero to “private AI lab” quickly and safely, while leaving headroom to grow. When you’re ready for more control of your hardware and high-availability ideas, you’ll graduate to Proxmox - and when you want raw, portable definitions and orchestration that jump across hosts, your Advanced Docker guide takes the reins.
Where this fits with the other guides
Unraid (this guide) is the gentle ramp - one box, click-ops, and fast progress.
Proxmox is your intermediate rigor - real hypervisor, clean templates, backups that scale, optional SDN and Ceph when you grow.
Docker Advanced is your orchestration and portability brain - stack definitions that jump across hosts without caring which hypervisor you picked.
Builder Intro & Master Resource Table - Unraid
Unraid is the friendliest on-ramp I know: boot from a tiny USB, manage an elastic array of mismatched disks, and add pools for speed. Docker and VMs are first-class citizens, and the plugin ecosystem fills most gaps, so you spend less time yak-shaving and more time building. The 7.1 line is stable enough for production homelabs, with 7.1.4 smoothing networking edges that bit earlier 7.1 users. If you’re on 7.1.0 or 7.1.1, update past the mover bug that was fixed in 7.1.2. (
Unraid Technical Summary & Documentation
A Builder’s technical guide to Unraid as a self-hosted AI + homelab platform.
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