Hi everyone,

 

This was posted in the General tab of Unraid, but as it is not getting any answers there, I thought to try it here, as all the issues keep persisting...

 

I have an nvme drive that I want to use to run my VM and use as a cache drive for editing in Lightroom and Photoshop. 

So sort of a bare-metal approach would be good.

 

My unraid setup is this : 

1*14TB  Parity drive

2*12 TB HDD for the array

1*2TB 2'5 SSD

Flash (USB) drive with unRAID

 

In my unassigned devices, I have :

nmve0n1 - 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus

sdc - 12 TB HDD which I want to use for HDD Work photo files

sdg - 12 TB HDD which I want to use for HDD Private photo files

 

What I want to setup, is a VM that is as fast as it can be, and not using network shares on the unRAID server, as 1. Lightroom is not a fan of that and 2. I prefer to keep using my Backblaze cloud service, to ensure backup - or can this be done by using symlinks? Or is that not 'powerful enough' to fool Backblaze?

IF there is a way to have the unRAID make copies of this too, that is a bonus and nice to have.

So setup an Win10 VM, ran off it's own NVMe drive (don't need it for unraid to keep things simple), with two dedicated own HDD's to store photos on. Backblaze will then cloud backup those files - if there is a simple way to have them protected by the parity/array, that would be great, if not, I'll trust Backblaze..

 

I have watched another movie : youtube Spaceinvader One  on passing through an nvme drive, but it is stated that the option is obsolete for some reason (I read evertyhing, but I am not sure where I would have to put certain things).  Seems that others are having the same issues, though the thread is not answerred anymore..

 

I have also followed Youtube movie 2 Spaceinvader One

and made a new VM, it seems it does work to pass through and I am a happy camper, being able to boot from the NVMe drive.  However, I did notice that I couldn't see my HDD's anymore, which house my Photo files.  So I shut it down, and added the HDD's into the mix (still using the /dev/sdc, and /dev/sdg, as nobody seems to be able to explain why the /by-id/ doesn't work for me... I have also tried "manual Vdisk Location" as /mnt/disks/HDD_Photos_Work/ (I renamed the HDD, so it's easier for me to see which is which)., but then the VMS edit tab keeps on "updating...", So I need to go out and change the settings again to /dev/sdc

When I do this, I can see in VNC Remote that it is trying to boot from the HDD, not the Nvme anymore :

When I try to edit the VM, I see that Primary vdisk location is no longer set to "none", but it set to one of the HDD's. As the NVMe is passed through (using the VFIO-PCI-CFG plugin), I can't see it anywhere (like Spaceinvader One mentions).

What I did forget to mention before - is that I had to make the VM using SeaBios, as I was getting errors when using OVMF.  I also tried doing this on the new VM I was making, but that didn't work and I was taken into a command shell, going with Seabios fixed that issue.

PLEASE can someone check this, as I have been looking around, reading everything that seemed relevant for days now, and no closer to solving my issue... 

Edited February 3, 20215 yr by DrBobke

I had already moved your other thread here, so going to lock this one.