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Windows VM drive setup (2023)


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Hi All,

Been loving Unraid for a few years now, lots of happy dockers and a few VMs for fun. I do have a Windows 10 VM which I use as a daily driver for email, web and general stuff. Its great but I wonder if I can get is a little more snappy ....

 

I have a couple of WD Blue SSD's setup as a BTRFS Pool where the dockers reside, along with my other VMs and Win10 60gb windows vdisk.

 

My question is, is this the best way?

 

Crystal Disk figures and not the best, I am thinking is this the issue?

image.png.b8fb6e959bc1deeebb1b7de3b2792db8.png

 

Don't get me wrong, it's working okay, and I know it's not going to be like my standalone gaming PC but what do you think?

(I have space for additional drives including nvme, pci slot)

 

System Spec is

i7-4790k on a ASRock Z97 mobo with 32gb of DDR3 Ram. Windows is lucky enough to have 8gb RAM allocated to it and 4 threads.

(62% system ram utilized on 'day-to-day' use - built from lots of old/little bits 4 HDD for General Storage, VM for CCTV with HHD passed through)

 

Thanks for any feedback

 

Andy

 

 

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1 hour ago, MrAndyBurns said:

My question is, is this the best way?

 

When you compare things to bare metal, so without taking consideration the cache, the best thing is to have the vm behaving as closed as possible to bare metal, because everything you emulate adds some overhead, that you may notice, or not, depending on how you use your vm.

In your case you are using an emulated (virtio or sata) controller, to attach an emulated vdisk.

Better could be an emulated controller (virtio or sata) with a physical disk passed through.

Best is to passthrough the controller (with the disk attached), sata or nvme.

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  • 1 month later...

Just taking you along with me if your interested and reading this a some point in the future.

 

I've updated to 6.12 and taken the opportunity to reformat my 2 disk SSD (WD blue 500gb) from BTFS to ZFS encrypted mirror and have had some good results. No other changes to VM Setup

 

image.png.c59b1432a23457007f37103b453e1877.png

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any now with the NVME drive passed though to the VM using /dev/disk/by-id/ ... interesting as I was expecting quicker ... now to see if I can pass the drive through as directly but I'm not sure its possible as its on a Z97 mobo and connected to the PCI bus with a cheap M.2 adapter card

 

image.png.d5eb912558baf941df0530e1f07de88b.png

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