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Automatically start an vm when trying to connect to it via rdp or sunshine/moonlight

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Hi,

i can't really find anything on my question (maybe my search skills are bad) but i have found nothing on how to achive the following:

I have 2 Windows VMs which are working perfectly, they have set ips within my network. Now what i want to do is they should start up as soon as there is an incoming connection on rdp or sunshine/moonlight.

That could of course mean that the first connections attemt might fail (because the vm is not done with the startup) but the 2nd 3rd or maybe 4th reconnect will work.

Why do I want this? Well we live in times where electricity is expensive, something not running consumes less power than something running (the vms have gpus passed through).

Is something like that at all possible? I mean unraid would have to act as sort of a network sniffer as the ips work via br0...

I am open to any ideas.

  • 2 weeks later...
  • Author

so i guess sleep/suspend is equaly good for powsersaving?

  • Community Expert
On 10/28/2025 at 3:06 PM, Zeze21 said:

Hi,

i can't really find anything on my question (maybe my search skills are bad) but i have found nothing on how to achive the following:

I have 2 Windows VMs which are working perfectly, they have set ips within my network. Now what i want to do is they should start up as soon as there is an incoming connection on rdp or sunshine/moonlight.

That could of course mean that the first connections attemt might fail (because the vm is not done with the startup) but the 2nd 3rd or maybe 4th reconnect will work.

Why do I want this? Well we live in times where electricity is expensive, something not running consumes less power than something running (the vms have gpus passed through).

Is something like that at all possible? I mean unraid would have to act as sort of a network sniffer as the ips work via br0...

I am open to any ideas.

It looks like moonlight supports wake on lan. I have a plugin called WOL for services which supports starting VMs via wol magic packets.

If you are using RDP, I'm assuming you're on a full OS (and not mobile), in which case you could write a simple script to send WOL packets then start the RDP session (easiest if you save the rdp config to file).

There are 3rd party RDP clients with WoL built in, but I have not used them personally.

If the client machine is trusted, you could also skip WoL and have a script to SSH into Unraid and issue the virsh commands directly.

Edited by tjb_altf4

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