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Windows 11 VM with NVMe Passthrough Slow


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Scratch that; installing W10. 

 

I've seen read a few topics on slow Windows VM performance, and have taken a few of the 'tuning' / performance improvement steps, but I'm still struggling to get my W11 VM to perform as expected. 

Symptoms: nothing quantifiable.

1. 100% Unraid/host CPU usage on VM boot and for "longer than required" once VM running/logged in.

2. Higher than expected VM idle CPU usage (10-20%)

3. Even with #2's 80% CPU head room available, opening applications, even as simple as Windows Explorer, has a noticeable 1-5s pause

 

"Expectation" baseline? Well, the W11 VM in question is installed on a WD Black NVMe drive, that was the previous primary OS on this box. I followed Space Invader's tutorial to stub the hard drive through to the VM. I have since learned this is the old fashioned way of doing this, so in my troubleshooting attempts, I have used  System Devices to bind the hard drive to VFIO on boot. 

 

System Specs:

Z590 GAMING CARBON WIFI (MS-7D06

11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-11600K @ 3.90GHz

64 GiB DDR4

 

I have followed this post items #1 & #3. I skipped #2 as I have assign the VM 10GB vRAM, and it's only using ~3. 

 

I started following Space Invader's "Advanced Server Tuning" video tutorials, but they seem pretty focused on the Array and Cache drives. I do not have a cache, and the WD Black is stubbed to the VM, so my understanding is that there is no interaction with Unraid OS itself. 

 

 

Also:

 

Guest Agent is installed. I have a W10Pro VM installed on an Unassigned WD Blue that is performing fine. Is this a hard drive stubbing issue? Windows 11? PEBCAK?

 

VM config .xml attached. 

 

Am I missing something?

 

Scratch that; installing W10. 

 

11.txt

Edited by bjsmith911
Added more reference links & System specs. Edit #2: Nvm. W10 is better anyway...
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First try to change the machine type to Q35. i440fx does not support PCIe, just regular PCI. You need PCIe since you are passing through NVMe drive, which is PCIe

 

If that makes no difference, try changing "threads" to only 1 and bump number of cores instead.

Edited by m00nman
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