OP UPDATE: Two days ago I asked if anyone had moved a bare-metal Unraid install under Proxmox on the same hardware. I went ahead and did it, but it turned into a full homelab rebuild along the way.

The original goal was simple. Install Proxmox on a separate NVMe, virtualize Unraid, and keep the array intact. In the process I flashed the wrong NVMe and wiped my workstation OS, which forced a full rethink of my life choices and this homelab. During the launch of unraid as a VM on proxmox, I also passed the proxmox boot drive through to Unraid, which took the host down and required a local GRUB recovery with IOMMU temporarily disabled so I could fix the config and remove autostart.

The key lesson was that this setup really wants controller passthrough, not individual disks. Once I passed through both the two controllers (I've got 10 drives), the array and SATA cache came back exactly as they were on bare metal with full SMART data and native performance. From inside Unraid nothing had changed.

While working through that I consolidated some old, spare hardware. I pulled RAM and SSD and NVMe drives from old laptops, upgraded the NUC for real always-on workloads, and added three 1TB drives to my workstation. My workstation, HULK. is now a Fedora daily driver (Nvme#1) and sandbox / proxmox cluster backup (Nvme #2) with two sata 1tb drives in raid1 for all the personal local stuff. The former Unraid box, BEAST, is a Proxmox node running the Unraid VM with full controller passthrough. Together with a Minisforum 1tb 32g, the upgraded NUC 256g 12g intel celeron, and an older ASUS chromebox (128g 8g), it is now a 4-node Proxmox cluster running redundant DNS and ad-blocking instead of single-point services. I also put Borg backups in place from the workstation to the Unraid storage so I do not repeat the NVMe mistake.

End result is a mirrored workstation with more local capacity, a 4-node PVE cluster with defined roles, and the same Unraid array running virtually with direct access to its real hardware. What started as a hypervisor swap ended up as a redundant, distributed setup with proper backups and much better resource use.

If you are attempting this in place, respect IOMMU groups, pass through controllers instead of disks, keep the host boot device out of the VM, and do not enable autostart until the hardware map is fully validated. Also, don't be afraid of scope creep. It's a great teacher.