[PLEX on archVM, DLNA Multicast issue?? br0]

OK few more questions.  Do you own a smartphone or tablet that you can test with? Plex has mobile apps that auto detect the Plex server running on the network.  Curious if that auto detection works on there as well.

 

Also, if you have it running in dom0 and it works fine, chances are the issue is either with the VM, Xen, or a combination of those things.

 

Still have a few things to look at tonight on my setup as well.

 

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[PLEX on archVM, DLNA Multicast issue?? br0]

Hmm. Let me check some things on my setup and I'll get back to you. Might be a little later today. Got some shopping to do this pm :-)

 

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[PLEX on archVM, DLNA Multicast issue?? br0]

What kind of TV do you have?  My lg has DLNA and this works fine for me. Didn't even have to give it the IP of the Plex server. Autodetects.

 

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[ArchVM with GUI and vnc?]

Try vnc = 1 and vnclisten=0.0.0.0 and vncpasswd=''

 

Then you should be able to use your tiger vnc client and connect to the ip of your dom0 and it will vnc into the domu. Not what you were doing exactly, but should achieve the desired result.

 

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[ArchVM with GUI and vnc?]

This old-timer is having some difficulty with 'new' technology!  I still remember the trepidation of moving from punched cards to using a Teletype 33 for 'online' programming in Fortran IV!

 

I have one ArchVM instance running reasonably well, and supporting a number of daemon services.

 

I am now trying to get a second instance of ArchVM running, with xfce4 (another gui would be fine) and a vnc server.  However, I have not been able to get a vnc client (running on Ubuntu as my desktop m/c) to recognise and connect to the vnc server.

 

I think that I have followed the instructions on ArchWiki for installing tigervnc and xfce4.  The problem comes when, I attempt to connect to the Virtual server desktop, having tried with three different vnc clients.  They don't find the vnc server on the network - if I try to connect they report 'connection refused'.  However, if I telnet to port 5901, I obtain a connection with the response "RFB 002.008", then disconnect again, and the following appears in the vnc server logfile:

Sun Apr 13 19:39:15 2014
Connections: accepted: 10.2.1.15::49409

Sun Apr 13 19:47:14 2014
Connections: closed: 10.2.1.15::49409 (Clean disconnection)

 

This makes me think that the server really is there and working, so why do the vnc clients fail??

 

Oh, the logfile does contain warnings about some problems with fonts and "expect ugly output", but I don't believe that this would cause connections to fail?

 

Nothing appears in the logfile relating to any connection attempt from a vnc client.

 

Help/advice/assistance, please!

 

When I have this cracked, I want to have a go at creating a virtual windows desktop, just in case it might come in useful to have a windows machine available.

 

Peter, can you post the contents of your VMs cfg file up here?  The one you're struggling with?

 

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[Pxe boot a VM]

Well, I keep finding guides and youtube videos where people are doing it.

 

Unfortunately I could only go as far as getting the windows logo. After a couple minutes, it says an error occurred and restarts.

 

I tried win 8 by the way, maybe I would have better luck with win 7 (all the youtube videos had win 7) but I gave up for now

 

Oh BTW, one thing I do remember from my days doing citrix stuff with PXE, I remember that you're supposed to set option 66 and 67 on your dhcp server for this to work I think.  Also did you stumble upon this same article:

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dominikheinz/archive/2011/03/18/dhcp-amp-pxe-basics.aspx

 

Just curious...

 

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[New to Xen, a few questions]

Oh and mossie, on the xenman register command, the .cfg and .img files need to be named the same (e.g. win81.cfg and win81.img).

 

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[New to Xen, a few questions]

And make sure you install the .net framework in the windows vm before you install the gplpv drivers otherwise you may crash unraid. I did. A couple of times.

 

Hmm, .net framework?  Is that installed automatically with Windows Update or did you download this manually?  I have never installed the .net framework manually but I always would perform all the Windows Updates before installing the GPLPV drivers.

 

I am not sure. I installed win 8 recently in a vm and applied all the updates,  but I still had to manually download and install .net and only after that shutdown and reboot through unraid started working. Without .net, issuing those commands from unraid command line or the web interface, crashed the whole server after a 2-3 min delay

 

On the following page someone is claiming that by default .net is not enabled in windows (but is installed apparently): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13034701/pre-installed-net-frameworks-on-windows-8

 

And on the following page, it mentions the .net 2.0 requirement, but sadly, this is the only place i saw it at, the univention wiki or the download pages omit that detail: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Windows_GplPv/Installing

 

Thank you so much for sharing all that. I am still having difficulties with shutdowns, but strange ones.  Win 8.1 tends to hang after I issue a shutdown through vnc. Windows server 2012 r2 doesn't. It shuts down cleanly through vnc. Neither of these shutdown via command line through dom0 (nor the webgui).

 

I tried installing the older .net framework yesterday and had some difficulties. Couldn't get shutdown working right. Got a few more things to try, but again, thank you for sharing.

 

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[Pxe boot a VM]

My windows vm that is set up on unraid is basically an img file that contains the entire filesystem, complete with the MBR. It is the image of a virtual drive.

 

I can load that image as a "VM" utilizing the Xen hypervisor in unraid 6

 

Or. . .

 

I can make that image file available through iscsi or nfs, etc. as if it was a virtual drive and boot from it. Then it is no longer a vm, nothing is being virtualized, but instead the computer is booting from a remote virtual hard drive. And that remote virtual drive is the same image file as above.

 

In the second scenario described, there is no hypervisor because the computer is directly booting from the image file that is essentially network mounted.

 

So I have one image file that contains the windows OS, and I can either boot it as a VM under Xen, or I can boot straight into it from another computer through iscsi

 

Did not know that. My only experience with PXE was with Citrix Provisioning Server and virtual desktops.  I knew you could provision to bare metal, but didn't know that you could use a VMs image to do so. Very cool.

 

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[Pxe boot a VM]

Forgive me as I'm really having a hard time understanding what you are trying to accomplish.  A VM is a virtual machine that runs under a hypervisor (like Xen). What hypervisor is running on your box that you currently have open elec running on?  Your thread is titled "PXE boot a VM".  What it sounds like is you want to be able to multiboot your htpc running open elec today and you want pxe to help you do that. What I don't understand is what this has to do with VMs.

 

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[Pxe boot a VM]

Let me ask this, are you planning on then putting unRAID on your openelec machine and then making openelec and Windows VMs (openelec local to the drive, Windows over the network)?

[New to Xen, a few questions]

ok, that's odd then, there is no option for me to click anything under xen domains. if i go inot the unraid web ui > extensions tab > xen domains > *nothing but domain-0 listed, i cannot do anything more there.

tbh i'm not sure how much management i will want to do once i have this windows box running fully, but it would be good to have for future, ease of use etc. may have a look in the xen orchestrator at some point then.

 

Whoops, forgot to give you the most important steps for the webGUI management stuff to work in beta 4.  First, make sure each of your VMs have their own folder.  Each folder should have a .cfg and .img.  Using SSH, connect to your unRAID tower.  Type the following command:

 

xenman register /path/to/cfg_file.cfg

 

This will "register" the VM with the Domain Manager and now the VM should show up in the list on the webGUI.

 

i guess thats a no for the disk drive as from what i gather while googleing is that my asus p5q (p45 chipset) does not support vt-d even though my x9650 cpu will. unless anyone on here is more knowledgeable perhaps?

 

Correct.  Both your motherboard and processor have to support VTd in order to do any type of PCI device pass through.  I would love it if someone could help us figure out how to get around that requirement but I don't see how we could...

 

right, from that i guess it will be an attempt at getting the unraid host to see the wireless card, then creating a bridge for the vm to use. the card i have is a TP-Link TL-WN951N (PCI wireless n card), appears under lspci as 'Atheros AR5416 [AR5008 802.11(a)bgn].

Can anyone suggest where to start to get this working in unraid 6b4?

 

Exactly.  Which you'll have two problems on this front for wireless.  Drivers is one thing, but the other is that there is no option in the webGUI right now to configure your "SSID" to connect to.  Definitely hoping you / some others can figure this out though.  Would be nice!

 

ok to explain it better, all i do is connect the one windows machines wifi to the hotspot of the phone, then using ics shares out the internet connection to the rest of my network (wired). the windows machine is configured to autoconnect to either of our phones when in range, we only use one at a time (no crazy bridging or anything)

 

Ok, makes total sense.  That said, I got to imagine that when you turn on the hotspot on your phone, you're then plugging the phone into some power source because hotspots are big battery drainers, right?  If so, another option if you're doing that already would be to get a wireless router that has support for a USB hotspot device.  I believe my Asus AC66U router supports this.  I could test for you if you'd like.  The downside is that your phone would need to remain plugged into it as long as you wanted to share out your internet.

 

also thanks for the explanation on gplpv drivers and the fact i need to install .net first, i will bear that in mind.

 

i'm hoping to get this working as it would be my preferred method, my second choice would be going down esxi route with raw device mapping for the disks, but from what i gather you loose the ability to spin down disks and smart monitoring etc, that imo would also be a shortfall

 

Exactly.  unRAID as Dom0 is the right answer and I think solving challenges like yours.  It just sucks that your motherboard doesn't support vtD.  I bet if it did, you could possibly pass through a USB or PCI based wireless device to a Windows or Linux VM that has the drivers you need and could handle it that way.

 

Above all else, if you had budget for a new mobo, that would be the most ideal.

[New to Xen, a few questions]

And make sure you install the .net framework in the windows vm before you install the gplpv drivers otherwise you may crash unraid. I did. A couple of times.

 

Hmm, .net framework?  Is that installed automatically with Windows Update or did you download this manually?  I have never installed the .net framework manually but I always would perform all the Windows Updates before installing the GPLPV drivers.

[Planning a home unraid build, hardware and virtualisation questions]

nice tower!  i like it

 

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[New to Xen, a few questions]

forgot to ask earlier,

 

4, what are gplpv drivers?

 

 

thanks again

 

Copied from the Xen Wiki:

 

These drivers allow Windows to make use of the network and block backend drivers in Dom0, instead of the virtual PCI devices provided by QEMU. This gives Windows a substantial performance boost...

 

You can get digitally signed versions of these GPLPV drivers for free from the univision.de website.  There are other threads in this forum with links to that, but let us know if you cannot find them.

 

Essentially when you virtualize windows with Xen, post install, if you go into device manager, you'll see that there are a bunch of drivers not installed.  Yes you can get on the internet and whatnot, but its highly recommended to install these drivers for two reasons:  Increase performance and increase reliability.

 

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[New to Xen, a few questions]

1, Can a management tool such as XenCenter be used with this unRaid / Xen build? or at least a webui? I couldnt get it to work, just used putty, tightVNC for the VM then RDP once built.

 

As of right now, there are some limited VM management tools included via the unRAID webGUI.  If you go to the Extensions Tab and click on the Domain Manager, you can do some basic VM Management from there.

 

In short, you cannot use XenCenter to manage Xen within unRAID at this time.  There are some open source management tools out there like Xen Orchestrator, but its "use at your own risk" for now.

 

2, Can physical CD/DVD drives be used? I have a spare DVD drive fitted in the unraid box, it would be nice if i could attach it to the windows VM, but not essential.

 

Generally speaking, yes, this is possible using pass through.  Your machine must support VTd in order to do pass through of any sort.

 

3, Wireless! I have a PCI wireless card fitted to the box also, obviously unraid doesnt see the interface, but if i was to install the drivers and create another bridge surely it would be possible for the VM then to use this?

 

I would defer to others on this.  This has nothing to do with virtualization, but rather, getting custom drivers installed.  Hopefully someone else can chime in on this as I don't know the answer here.

 

Second to that my board doesnt support vt-d but i can see the device id using lspci, can this be passed through to the VM? if either way is possible please help, I will explain my need for this shortly.

 

If your board doesn't support VTd, you cannot do PCI pass through.  lspci will show you PCI devices regardless of whether or not you have VTd, but attempts to pass through will fail without it.  To go a step further, if you have a K series Intel Processor, it doesn't even matter if your board supports it, because the K processors don't support it.

 

As for an explanation for the wireless need. I currently live in an area where the average broadband speed is circa 1-2mb at best, come evenings this can drop to below a meg and is beyond a joke, especially considering the prices they charge. Therefore i have since cancelled my home broadband and run everything through a pair of android mobile phones. Myself and my wife both have unlimited data (tethering included) contracts and the average speeds are 6-8MB on 3G and 4G is to hit our area this summer. This have been faultless for the last 3 months.

 

I currently have it set on another windows box that it will autoconnect to our phones when in range (i.e. at home) and the shares its wireless connection via ICS on the eth port to the rest of the house. i also use utorrent rss features on it atm, which i wish to transfer to the vm until i get apps like SB, trans and sabnzb set up.

 

My plan is to replicate this with a vm inside the unraid box dropping my hardware usage by one machine and have a single 'always on' box storing media with parity (unraid), proving the ICS bridge (windows vm) and possibly another vm for testing. Somewhere in there the apps will be implemented also.

 

Ok, I totally get what you are doing with your phones and I know multiple people that do the same thing due to living in areas that don't have good service.  That said, I'm still a little confused on what you are trying to accomplish.  Can you please better explain how your Windows box "auto connects" to your phones today?  Is that wifi hotspot you use?  Does it connect to BOTH of your phones and bridge those connections together?  I think what you're trying to accomplish is doable, but need to clarify those points.

 

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