Unraid as VM in Windows 11 using VMWare Workstation 17 Pro or Player

[elamine2uk]

Hi

 

Wanted to share outcome of a week worth of fidling with new hardware: ASrock X670E + AMD Ryzen 7900 + DDR5

 

Initially planned to install unraid natively and then run few Windows VMs with passthrough of NMVE disk and onboard Video or Quadro Nvidia P400 GPU. 

 

Plan did not go as expected as I faced a lot of issues leading to reboots, BSOD on Windows VMs....I gave up in the end and tried to find a way to leverage the new bought hardware  before my wife show me the door out. I hope these are teething issues related to new hardware that will be fixed later.

 

So I came up with a plan to install Windows 11 Natively on the new hardware. This very stable and no issues faced at all.

 

Then using VMware Workstation 17 Player initially then Pro later (bought cheap license) I was able to do the following:

 

- Create an unraid VM

- with Virtual NIC (e1000e) and bridged it to the motherboard NIC. Now i get Speedtest almost as good as reality: 2.2-2.5Gb/s up and down

- 3 Sata Hard disks passed through

- 1 NVME Hard Disk passed through and used as cache

- 1 Virtual USB Controller to which I attach the Unraid flash 

- 1 Virtual CD/DVD to be able to boot into it and boot into USB:  click here for a guide on this trick

 

Docker works perfectly so far using SpeedTest and LuckyBuckup

 

We will see how stability will play out...but I will report back if any issues

 

 

 

[Mauro Marzo]

Very interesting setup! Any updates about how it’s going?

[elamine2uk]

All good so far Mauro!

[mehdi1980]

any update ?