SWKerr

I have moved my old UnRAID server to a GA-AX370-Gaming K7 motherboard with a Ryzen 7 1700. One of my main reasons for the upgrade was to support a Windows VM with a Pass-Thru graphics card and USB pass-thru. This post is more of an informational post about what I discovered. The move from the old Intel based box went perfectly. I just moved the USB boot with the SSD Cache and UnRAID array disks. Everything came up perfectly. The SMB shares and Emby Docker came up without changes. The only issue I had was needing to change static IP on the router since the mac address was different. My problem was with setting up a Windows VM. I was able to install a basic Windows VM without a problem but I was not able to get the GPU to pass-thru. I tried multiple AMD and Nvidia Video cards without success. Ultimately the problem was with the BIOS. Before I started the move I upgraded the BIOS on the GA-AX370 to F31. This turned out to be an issue. I later upgraded to the F40 BIOS but it also did not work as expected. I ended up down grading to the BIOS version I had before the upgrade which was F23. After installing F23 I was able to get the Video Card to pass-thru to the VM without a problem. I was not able to get any on-board USB controllers to pass-thru to the VM. I had to add a PCIe add-on USB controller to get that working. I will update this post if I find out anything that might benefit other user of this motherboard.

Noob to unRAID! Setup first server this weekend and have some questions related to passing thru a video card to a Windows 10 VM. Setup: Ryzen 1700 with a MSI B350M Mortar motherboard and 16GB RAM. 3x4TB, 1x3TB Array with Parity, 512GB SSD Cache drive MSI Radeon RX 570 ARMOR video card (Also: using a AMD HD6450) The setup has been pretty painless and the Array is working well with excellent performance. I was able to setup a Windows 10 VM with VNC\Remote Desktop with out issue. But: I want to pass-thru the video card to to the VM so I can get gaming level performance while also running the unRAID file server and maybe some dockers. And here is where I am having a problem. In researching unRAID, everything I saw indicated I needed to have two video cards. One for the unRAID server and another for the VM. (Ryzen does not have built in graphics, added a HD6450) The primary issue I have is that unless the card is in the Primary video slot it will not get its own IOMMU group. So I can not pass-thru a video card that is not the boot screen card without an error. Now here is my confusion. I can boot with only the RX570 and then assign that card to the Windows VM from the Dashboard. I have to use another PC or cell phone\tablet to start the Array and VM but it appears to work when started without impacting the server. When I start the VM the screen goes blank for a few minutes while the VM boots but then it seems to behave normally. From the videos I have seen and the reading I did I did not think this would work. Is there a major downside to doing this or is it pure luck that it works? Honestly this seem easier than the steps in most of the guides I have seen. Also: I would like to figure out if it would be possible to get a second video card working. I have turned on "Enable PCIe ACS Override" but it does little to break out the IOMMU groups. Is this related to the newness of the Ryzen motherboards or is there something that can be done manually with the xml file to pass-thru the cards or other hardware not in their own group?