New to VMs, some Q's: Safely eject hardware menu; installing drivers best practice

Hi there,

I made the (perhaps crazy?) decision to replace my ageing desktop and server with a single machine running Unraid + a Windows 11 VM.

It's been a journey learning about it all, but I have still have a few questions I haven't been able to get to the bottom of, and which I would love your insight on.

My VM XML is attached for reference.

I'm using Q35-9.1 as the machine type, as I heard it's better as it supports PCIe rather than just PCI (even though the default template used i440fx-9.1 - so hopefully that wasn't a foolish change on my part, as I hear changing it will 'deactivate' my Windows 11 Pro key).

1: all the devices in the 'safely eject hardware' menu

Is it just accepted that using a VM will mean that the list of emulated devices appears in the Windows "Safely remove hardware" menu?

I've seen a few ways to stop them from appearing, such as editing registry, editing the VM XML (I don't want to break the GUI functionality by manually editing my VM XML), running scripts at Windows boot etc, but I was wondering if there is a best practice? My concern is that by setting these devices as non-removable it will somehow impact something in the VM engine (like, are they set as removable for a reason?).

Or is this something that people put up with.

2: installing drivers in Windows

I've installed all the VFIO drivers for devices with warnings in Device Manager, as well as the NVIDIA drivers for my passed-through GPU (bound to VFIO), and the Realtek drivers for my passed through sound device. However, the Realtek software included with my motherboard doesn't find the soundcard (worth noting: I only use the optical out - I can't seem to see the analogue out in the device manager, but optical works fine). It was when I went to install the Intel NIC drivers that I realised that (of course) the hardware is being emulated, as there is no Intel NIC in device manager.

Is this just how VM's work? With all the drivers emulated, some of the bundled software won't work? Is there a list of drivers that I should be installing (eg my monitor, as it's attached to my GPU that is bound to VFIO and not emulated)? Or if there's no yellow triangle in Devcie Manager, then all is good?

Anyway, those are the final things that I'm struggling to understand/find information on, so I'm here asking for help from people with more experience than I.

Your help and guidance, as always, is appreciated.

Diagnostics attached.

And in case it's not contained in the diagnostics, so is my VM's XML and my IOMMU groups.

Thanks again.

willow-diagnostics-20250209-1322.zip Win11VM.xml IOMMU.txt

Edited February 12, 20251 yr by jademonkee
Removed Audio and IOMMU bits, as I got some things wrong and have sinced figured out some others myself