Hi all,

I’m trying to confirm whether TPM-based registration is supported when running Unraid as a VM.

My setup is:

• Unraid running as a VM on Proxmox

• Proxmox VM BIOS set to OVMF/UEFI

• EFI disk added

• TPM 2.0 device added to the VM

• LSI SAS2308 HBA passed through directly to the Unraid VM

• Unraid has direct access to the physical disks through the passed-through HBA

• USB flash device is still passed through to Unraid for the current licence

• Internal boot is now working successfully

The reason for this setup is that I prefer to run Proxmox as the main hypervisor because I also run other VMs and use Proxmox Backup Server. I really like Unraid as a NAS, but I prefer Proxmox for the hypervisor layer.

What I’m trying to do is move away from needing the USB flash device for licensing and use TPM/internal registration instead.

Unraid can see the TPM device inside the VM:

root@NAS:~# ls -l /dev/tpm*
crw------- 1 root root  10,   224 Jun  6 10:20 /dev/tpm0
crw------- 1 root root 240, 65536 Jun  6 10:20 /dev/tpmrm0

dmesg also shows the TPM 2.0 device:

tpm_tis MSFT0101:00: 2.0 TPM (device-id 0x1, rev-id 1)

The VM is also booted via UEFI:

efi: EFI v2.7 by Proxmox distribution of EDK II
Secure boot disabled

However, Unraid also clearly detects the virtualized environment:

DMI: QEMU Standard PC
Hypervisor detected: KVM

From the Proxmox side, the VM config includes:

bios: ovmf
boot: order=scsi0;usb0
efidisk0: local-lvm:vm-999-disk-3,efitype=4m,size=4M
tpmstate0: local-lvm:vm-999-disk-4,size=4M,version=v2.0
usb0: host=0781:5591
hostpci0: 0000:01:00.0

The Unraid registration page still only shows the licence device as USB Flash and does not offer any option to move the registration to TPM/internal boot.

Is this expected when Unraid is running inside a Proxmox/KVM VM, even though the vTPM is visible to the guest OS?

I’m assuming the answer may be that TPM licensing is only supported on bare metal with a physical TPM, and not with a vTPM inside a VM, but I wanted to confirm.

Thanks!

**CHATGPT helped summarize this..

nas-diagnostics-20260607-1003.zip

TPM is only supported for bare metal, not even passing through a TPM module can be used with a virtualized install, you can still use internal boot, but will need to keep the flash drive for licensing.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

TPM is only supported for bare metal, not even passing through a TPM module can be used with a virtualized install, you can still use internal boot, but will need to keep the flash drive for licensing.

Thank you, good to know. I was hoping to get rid of the USB disk completely.

But this is already a step in the right direction, I can now back up the internal boot disk via PBS.

Keep up the good work!

Edited June 7Jun 7 by happythatsme
Ttypo