Rebuilding Windows 10 VM

[Naldinho]

Just had a week long blackout and when I got power back my VM was not working correctly -- attempts to fix it led to deciding to just delete it and start over. It has been a few years since I set up the VM and I would greatly appreciate some help on understanding some of the decisions I made. 

This is a general use Windows VM -- mostly used for graphic design as well as general computer use (email,browsing,youtube,etc). No gaming.

Unraid machine is a dual E5-2670 with 128G of ram mostly used for mass storage and a handful of VMs. There is an SSD outside the array.

1) The original Windows 10 VM was using a passthroughed SSD but when I was searching for how to set that up again I found a claim that there is no meaningful performance benefit to using a passthroughed SSD vs a vdisk on a dedicated SSD -- is this accurate? If yes is there some other reason why I would choose one of the other?

2) Reading the pinned topics I see that one of them says not to use more than 4 CPUs -- I was previously using either 8 or 10. Would I be better off just using 4?

 

3) I have been experimenting since last night and I can't even get to the point where I install Windows. What should my choices be for Machine, BIOS, and Hyper-v? (the graphics card is a Navida GTX 1050 Ti)

I'd really appreciate some help. I need to get this VM up and running by Monday and I've put in 5-6 hours so far and haven't even made an inch of progress.

If there is a tutorial somewhere that would be great as well -- I have found a few but they are older and unraid has options in the VM settings that were not there when those tutorials were made

[ghost82]

10 hours ago, Naldinho said:

1) The original Windows 10 VM was using a passthroughed SSD but when I was searching for how to set that up again I found a claim that there is no meaningful performance benefit to using a passthroughed SSD vs a vdisk on a dedicated SSD -- is this accurate? If yes is there some other reason why I would choose one of the other?

If the ssd is passed through as a 'by-id' block you will connect this block to a virtual disk controller; if the disk is a vdisk file the virtual disk is attached in the same way to a virtual disk controller; so, yes it's nearly the same.

If you passthrough a sata/nvme controller you wont have the overhead of the virtual disk controller, this is noticeable or not depending on the hardware.

 

10 hours ago, Naldinho said:

2) Reading the pinned topics I see that one of them says not to use more than 4 CPUs -- I was previously using either 8 or 10. Would I be better off just using 4?

It depends on how many physical cores you have: best practice is to reserve cpu 0 to unraid (and its hyperthreaded core), then you can assign the others.

If you are using only the vm when it runs with no other particular background processes, just reserve cpu 0 (and its hyperthreaded core) and assign the others to the vm.

 

10 hours ago, Naldinho said:

3) I have been experimenting since last night and I can't even get to the point where I install Windows. What should my choices be for Machine, BIOS, and Hyper-v? (the graphics card is a Navida GTX 1050 Ti)

Nothing particular and everything is quite straight forward to have a basic windows vm running:

- choose q35 + ovmf (ovmf+tpm for windows 11)

- choose a vdisk or disk to install windows on

- choose an iso for installation media

- choose the virtio iso for virtio drivers (only needed if you use any virtio device)

- run the vm; if it falls back to the uefi shell when you are in vnc viewer just type 'exit' and you will access ovmf bios, choose 'continue' and then press a key on your keyboard to run from the installation iso

 

If you want to go very smooth do not choose any virtio device, especially for the virtual disk controller, otherwise you need to load virtio drivers, because windows doesn't include them and it wont be able to see the disk.

 

Tutorial?for example this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miYUGWq6l24