edgeinterface

For time being I switched back to bare metal win10. I don't think type1 hypervisor environment is for me right now. All the issues with locked devices when switching between vms and lack of sharing basic devices like mouse keyboard and sound card made my daily use of computer more problematic than it's worth. That's not a fault of unraid but rather me not really understanding how things work. I will keep my unraid usb stick and will keep checking out what's happening but for now I'm giving up.

Yep, that sounds exactly like what I would want to have. If that's only a matter of know-how it's good because probably somebody knows how and maybe will do it

Hi, My current and biggest gripe with unraid is that to be able to run 2 VMs at the same time I need to double up on every hardware I want to use in those VMs. I googled stuff like "kvm sharing devices" but didn't find anything that could hint it is possible to do. So either my google-fu sucks or that's not the way KVM works or maybe it's just not how all type1 hypervisors work. What I thought I will get when switching from bare metal Windows to unraid? Well, I hoped to have work VM running and my home/gaming VM running at the same time. I hoped I could use same sound card and same webcam on both of them so when my friend calls me on my private skype I would be able to answer as well as I could have calls with my work team mates on my work skype in my work VM. But reality is different. I need to run either work VM or home VM. And very often when I switch between them by shutdown in current and starting up the other I get boot issues which I guess stem from devices not being properly released by first VM. So I have to reboot whole system. I guess what I was expecting was VirtualBox on steroids. Seamless virtualization environment but with real GPU where I need it. I hoped everything else to be as easy as in VirtualBox. Need a sound card? Sure, here's emulated one. Need real one? Sure, here's list of your devices, please select one. Even if I had to use command line to do it I wouldn't complain because I would get what I want and need to have to not feel pain every time I need to jump from one VM to another. I expected more power and capabilities but it seems like what I got is just more issues than it's worth. Just to be clear: I don't blame unraid or kvm or anybody here. When tool is not right for the work it's not tool to blame. I think unard is great when used as it was meant to be used but I would like to know if my needs can even be met in kvm world in general (for example would it be possible when running KVM in Fedora or other Linux OS?) or I should just get back to VirtualBox and stop whining? I would really appreciate the answer because right now I kind of wasted a lot of time to have stuff setup but the more I try to like it the more problems I discover and I really think about installing my Win10 on bare metal and get back to my boring but free of such issues.

You can do normal shutdown / restart / whatever from Start -> Power menu in Win10. You can also do Stop / Restart of VM from webGui and that should issue Shutdown / Restart signal to guest OS but why would you do that when you already are in that guest OS? Regarding applications installed in Win10 you can put them wherever you want. I personally put all applicaions on VM's vdisk (resize vdisk when needed more space) while documents, media files, etc. go to share that all VMs have access to. Installing applications to separate vdisk makes no sense because you need that disk space anyway and when VM gets corrupted and you need to reinstall OS you will need to install them again, right? I think stopping array stops VMs by sending Stop to them but maybe that's just wishful thinking, I never checked it myself.

Ah, little detail I missed. Oh well, let's hope it will be released and pulled into unraid in some near-ish future. Would be one less thing to duplicate when you want / need to run 2 VMs with real hardware.

I think preparing "base" VM helps a lot in the long run so you don't have to start from scratch every time you decide you need another VM with that OS. I have 25GB "base" Win10 VM with all stuff I will need in every VM created out of it (so all updates at the time of creation, devices, drivers, applications like skype, slack, notepad++, windows commander, etc.). It's also activated Win10 so I wouldn't have issues when I clone it (I have several keys from kinguin but only used one so not leeching anything, money got paid). That VM initially had 150GB vdisk but then I realized that's silly because copying that vdisk around takes some time even on ssd. Also not every VM will need so much space. So I cleaned up what I could within Win10 (like 9GB of Windows.old even though I did new clean installation not an upgrade) and got under 20GB with all files. So I shrunk it to 25GB and now I can spawn new "clone" in matter of seconds. Now I have private VM resized to 50GB and work VM resized to 100GB. Also another 50GB VM hosting MSSQL server and IIS I use for my work and private development projects. Also I think good idea is to put your VMs vdisks on out of array SSD, not on cache SSD (xfs is much better for running VMs than btrfs). Thing that a lot of newbies lured to unRaid by Linus and his "X gamers, 1 CPU" videos misses when they configure their setups Just install Unassigned Devices plugin, mount SSD not added to array and that's all.

Not sure if that was posted already but take a look here: http://vfio.blogspot.com/2016/07/intel-graphics-assignment.html If I'm reading it right but iGPU pass-through seems to be possible. Also "I've been told this works with Skylake" makes me kind of happy since I have i7-6700K and it would be nice to be able to put that iGPU to some work more serious than just showing webui from time to time. So should it work on current unRaid version (I run 6.2.0.rc2) or that article is only applicable for "normal" linux systems?

Well, if there's UI mode why wouldn't I want to use it? I can run unRaid without it but is that how it should be? It got broken in very mysterious way but that's fine because real man ssh? Anyway, looks like now everything works again. I didn't change anything in BIOS or hardware but after few restarts new copy of unRaid booted up into webGUI without any issues. Then I just copied config files from old installation to this new one and I have everything configured as it was. Just as it messed itself up it fixed itself as well. Very frikking trustworthy.

I'm running memtest right now. Other weird things started to happen. I restarted unRaid and when I booted up webGUI showed me registration page even though I had still 13 days of trial left. I requested another trial but when I pasted url to key it failed to download it. Also all my configuration of shares and assigned drives was gone, everything looked just like fresh installation. So I formatted my pendrive and copied unRaid files again and after that trial key was downloaded successfully. But those issues with displaying unRaid UI are still occurring. memtest is at 55% now, running test #10[Modulo 20, Random Pattern]. No errors found yet and I really doubt there will be any. This is exactly stuff that was keeping me from committing fully to unRaid. Weird issues with system that as all Linuxes is fking mess when it gets corrupted. And it got corrupted by god knows what. I guess I won't invest any money into license any time soon. Shame because today morning I was thinking "today is the day".

Hi, I started my unraid after a break of a week or 2 and I have some weird issues with how it displays itself on my screen. I didn't change any hardware or BIOS options (except setting up boot from unraid usb and switching to iGFX from Auto). I took a picture of how logging screen looks like. As you can see at the bottom of a screen there's an area of "pixel noise" and if you look closer at the top you will see that that bottom part is drawn there but with some kind of shift to the left (notice that green-ish vertical 'flare' starting at login editbox and where is is at the top of the screen) When I log in bottom part becomes black and webGUI is drawing like it was early '70s not a frikking Skylake iGPU. Top of the screen continues to display bottom part but without shit to the left. And when I move mouse cursor over it it gets redrawn with what should be there: tabs of web browser that is showing webGUI. And I also don't have access to that "start menu" that allows to start Midnight Commander and terminal. Anybody has any idea WTF? It really was working fine last time I was using it. And when I connect from my laptop there's no problems with speed or layout of webGUI so it must be something local to server. Something wrong with graphics drivers or sth?

Please forgive me for this necro but I wonder how did Linus connect multiple keyboards and mice to that one machine? Was it with wireless usb receivers as logitech has passed through to VMs? I don't think there was enough usb ports to connect 14 devices or was it? And what about sound? I recon hdmi audio from each GPU was playing but what if player would like to use mics to talk? 7 pci sound cards pci wouldn't fit since GPUs took 7 PCI slots already and how many more 1x/2x/4x that mobo could have? So again usb stuff? Some kind of virtual sound cards inside VMs? Could you share some more sikrets?

@jonathanm I am like Jon Snow, I know nuthin' I will try this later but just for sake of clarity can you explain how this thing affects VMs using snapshots instead of "real" copied of vdisk? with regular separate vdisk files I can simply increase their sizes and when I enable additional space in Disk Management windows will just see it. Does it work differently when using reflink and snapshots? Or am I completely missing the point?

Yeah, snapshot, attach to Vm, profit. That's kind of awesome that it's actually little bit scary So if I understand it correctly to use this for my VMs which are residing in "cache only" usershare on SSD I have to: format my cache SSDs as BTRFS create my VM vdisk not as raw but as qcow2 Does having cache SSD formatted as BTRFS changes anything for normal cache related unRaid operations? Should I maybe have separate SSDs for my magical snapshotted VMs and for "cache"?

Let me repeat what was said in that quoted thread: Mind f-ing blown Right now I have 4 Win10 VMs, each with 30GB vdisk which I basically copied from initial VM after I managed to set up everything for it (usb passthrough, all Win updates, initial win configuration, etc.). So I have 120GB taken for those vdisks. And now it seems that I could just use that reflink voodoo and have most of that space actually free to use? And any change would just be local to particular VM without affecting others? That is some crazy sh!t going on.

One common / base vdisk for all VMs and each of them maintaining their own "diff disk"? Sounds too cool to be true but I would love such feature