Hello,

I just started building my 2nd unraid server and I am having issues with a Windows VM with GPU and NVME passthrough. My 1st unraid server had 4 VMs (2 of them running 24/7), but none of them were windows VM. I used a micro PC with unraid mainly for the ease of use with the VMs for home assistant and freePBX and the mostly easy Docker setup. I currently also use a windows PC as my Plex server (with a LSI 9211-8i for all of the drives) and plan to migrate Plex to the new computer.

For my new Unraid server (specs in the signature), I have figured out how to passthrough the Intel iGPU to a Plex container and have already tested with using HW transcoding to transcode 4 active 4k HDR streams to 1080p SDR (looked like the GPU stats had plenty of room for a few more streams). I also have the plex container to use /dev/shm for the transcode directory.

My issue right now is that I cannot get my Windows VM working correctly. I have figured out how to passthrough the RTX 5070 to the Windows VM so that it is viewable in the windows VM using RDP or moonlight/sunshine, but It does not actually output to the display using the HDMI port. Also, I cannot passthrough the NVME as I would like to have it actually boot from the NVME and not use a vdisk. It is passed through in the System Devices, but it is not available in the Windows VM as a drive. Checking control panel shows an error for the Standard NVM Express controller with device status "This Device cannot start (Code 10) An I/O adapter hardware error has occurred". The strange thing is, before creating the unraid flash disk for this server, I had installed windows onto that NVME drive and had everything working well (to test the installation of everything and to run Passmark benchmarking software). I also tried setting up a separate keyboard and mouse with USB passthrough in the VM and could not get the display to work).

Any help is appreciated to figure this out.

So, I never figured out why the 4 TB Samsung 990 Evo NVME would not show up as a passthrough for installing Windows 11 VM, but I was able to get Windows 11 installed through a 2 TB Samsung 9100 Pro NVME as passthrough (and was very impressed with the Passmark scores on that drive in a VM) After doing that, I stopped binding the 4 TB Samsung 990 Evo NVME and added it as a separate cache pool and moved my domains, appdata, and docker.img to it.

For the NVIDIA RTX 5700 VM passthrough issue, I was able to solve that by adding the line <maxphysaddr mode='passthrough' limit='39'/> to the XML by following the suggestions in this thread. https://forums.unraid.net/topic/186349-error-in-vm-with-nvidia-gpu-passthrough-qemu-system-x86_64-vfio_map_dma-failed-invalid-argument/#comment-1522992 After that I was able to boot up the VM, with the sound and display working through the HDMI port and my USB mouse and keyboard worked as passthrough USB devices on the VM.