March 31, 201412 yr I was wondering if anyone has been able to run a VM with XEN and view it using the unRAID box with an attached monitor? From what I read, most people are connected to the unRAID box from another computer with a vnc viewer. Ideally, I would like to get rid of my current laptop and just use my unRAID box as my main computer with a Windows VM (Considering my unRAID box is much more powerful than my current laptop). Is this even possible?
March 31, 201412 yr How technically savvy are you? I only ask because what you desire isn't for the technically inept to attempt right now. You should start by reading IronicBadger's post here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31754.0 This is about enabling GPU passthrough in a VM. Essentially what you can do is trick your Video Card on your tower to directly serve video from a Windows VM. I think this also works with non-Windows VMs, but I would assume your desired "desktop OS" would be Windows (sorry if I'm assuming wrong). I personally have not yet attempted this, but IronicBadger has this working with his setup. As of now, I believe there are some specific GPU requirements to make this functional, but the end goal could be something like this: Now that youtube video is of KVM (not Xen), but in theory, we should be able to get there just the same using Xen. Now all of this said, if you're not looking for GPU passthrough, but rather, just want to have a VNC viewer built into unRAID, it's not as easy as you might think. I attempted to get tigervnc installed on slackware. While I was able to get it installed, I couldn't get the viewer to ever run. I always get a "error while loading shared libraries: libSM.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory". Probably missing that dependency. I think there may be more missing than just that one file too. Needless to say, having a local VNC viewer on slackware to me is probably not a worthy cause to pursue. GPU passthrough to VMs will offer a better user experience.
March 31, 201412 yr There has been some discussion of this. It appears that is possible with suitable hardware. Typically you need a graphics card and motherboard that support GPU passthrough. It seems that there is no hard-and fast what hardware meets this requirement -it seems to be a case of try it and see.
March 31, 201412 yr Excellent idea! I will be following this post .. this is exactly what i would like to try: just 1 motherboard/psu/cpu/ram/case running my storage (Unraid) and my VMs (windows1 for gaming, linux to practise and learn, window2s for editing hd video, pfSense to try to set up my firewall/vpn, etc).
March 31, 201412 yr Author How technically savvy are you? I only ask because what you desire isn't for the technically inept to attempt right now. You should start by reading IronicBadger's post here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31754.0 This is about enabling GPU passthrough in a VM. Essentially what you can do is trick your Video Card on your tower to directly serve video from a Windows VM. I think this also works with non-Windows VMs, but I would assume your desired "desktop OS" would be Windows (sorry if I'm assuming wrong). I am tech savvy enough to be dangerous Your assumption is correct that I would want it to be Windows. It is awesome that it is possible! I will probably wait until there have been more tests though. As you can see I would have to buy a new CPU that supports VT-d and I would also have to buy a GPU (and that assumes that my motherboard would even work). I would hate to invest that kind of money only to find out that I purchased the wrong items. If anyone would like to post their experiences on this topic, please feel free!
March 31, 201412 yr How technically savvy are you? I only ask because what you desire isn't for the technically inept to attempt right now. You should start by reading IronicBadger's post here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31754.0 This is about enabling GPU passthrough in a VM. Essentially what you can do is trick your Video Card on your tower to directly serve video from a Windows VM. I think this also works with non-Windows VMs, but I would assume your desired "desktop OS" would be Windows (sorry if I'm assuming wrong). I am tech savvy enough to be dangerous Your assumption is correct that I would want it to be Windows. It is awesome that it is possible! I will probably wait until there have been more tests though. As you can see I would have to buy a new CPU that supports VT-d and I would also have to buy a GPU (and that assumes that my motherboard would even work). I would hate to invest that kind of money only to find out that I purchased the wrong items. If anyone would like to post their experiences on this topic, please feel free! Post your system specs. If your system was built in the last 4 years, chances are you have the CPU support you need. Case in point I have a second old tower I use for 5.0.5 right now, but only until peter ports open VPN to unRAID 6. That tower was tested with beta 3 and 4 and both were successful. This is an and c60 apu nasty old processor and super slow. Got multiple VMS to run on it. Just know that your biggest limitation is typically memory, not CPU. On the GPU, there has been much development on this regard. There are so many ways this could go. If tom adds KVM support to unRAID, the video I linked originally would apply. If not, just Google XenGT. That's enough to get me excited. On the motherboard, its mostly about the chip set. Bottom line, badger has proven the concept, what's next is making sure we can get a wide range of support for consumer grade GPUs for this. No one wants to but a quaddro card from nvidia. That's big money... Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
March 31, 201412 yr Author unRAID Version: 5.0.5 Plus Mobo: ASRock H77 Pro4-M CPU: Intel i3-2120 3.30GHz RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB PSU: CORSAIR CX430M Bottom line, badger has proven the concept, what's next is making sure we can get a wide range of support for consumer grade GPUs for this. No one wants to but a quaddro card from nvidia. That's big money... Very true! It would be really nice if I could just pass thru the Intel built in graphics. These days I am only watching HD videos on my computer so a quaddro card would defiantly be over kill (but if one fell out of the sky and landed in my unRAID box I wouldn't ask questions)
March 31, 201412 yr Well there is no reason for me to think this wouldn't be possible. Just not sure when. There is a lot of testing ahead of us to examine all of the possibilities here. Sent from my LG-V500 using Tapatalk
March 31, 201412 yr unRAID Version: 5.0.5 Plus Mobo: ASRock H77 Pro4-M CPU: Intel i3-2120 3.30GHz RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB PSU: CORSAIR CX430M Bottom line, badger has proven the concept, what's next is making sure we can get a wide range of support for consumer grade GPUs for this. No one wants to but a quaddro card from nvidia. That's big money... Very true! It would be really nice if I could just pass thru the Intel built in graphics. These days I am only watching HD videos on my computer so a quaddro card would defiantly be over kill (but if one fell out of the sky and landed in my unRAID box I wouldn't ask questions) OK no support on that CPU for vtd. Yes for vtx. If your watching vids, my suggestion is to get Plex on arch VM, then go get a $35 Google chromecast. I'm using that at home for media streaming. Works great. Gotta have an HDMI port. Sent from my LG-V500 using Tapatalk
April 1, 201412 yr unRAID Version: 5.0.5 Plus Mobo: ASRock H77 Pro4-M CPU: Intel i3-2120 3.30GHz RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB PSU: CORSAIR CX430M Bottom line, badger has proven the concept, what's next is making sure we can get a wide range of support for consumer grade GPUs for this. No one wants to but a quaddro card from nvidia. That's big money... Very true! It would be really nice if I could just pass thru the Intel built in graphics. These days I am only watching HD videos on my computer so a quaddro card would defiantly be over kill (but if one fell out of the sky and landed in my unRAID box I wouldn't ask questions) OK no support on that CPU for vtd. Yes for vtx. If your watching vids, my suggestion is to get Plex on arch VM, then go get a $35 Google chromecast. I'm using that at home for media streaming. Works great. Gotta have an HDMI port. Sent from my LG-V500 using Tapatalk Wouldn't it be cool to create an app that would allow unraid to stream video to the Chromecast?
April 1, 201412 yr That's what I'm doing right now. I have a arch VM running on beta 4 then wirelessly streaming video to my Chromecast. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
April 1, 201412 yr That's what I'm doing right now. I have a arch VM running on beta 4 then wirelessly streaming video to my Chromecast. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Hi, very interesting. Is there any guide you used to do it?
April 1, 201412 yr That's what I'm doing right now. I have a arch VM running on beta 4 then wirelessly streaming video to my Chromecast. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Hi, very interesting. Is there any guide you used to do it? I can and will post something soon. I wanted to do some further testing to validate everything first. This is a pretty straightforward setup to be totally honest. Arch Linux VM (credits to ironic badger), then install Plex for arch (Google it). Plex app on mobile phones (ios android or windows) is the remote. If you aren't a Plex subscriber, the remote app is $5. I promise a guide and video will be posted not too long from now. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
April 1, 201412 yr The original point of the thread was to get video out from a VM. This would allow, for example, running Windows in a VM and using your unRAID server hardware to also be your Windows PC, including the video hardware output from the virtual PC instead of some sort of remote desktop such as vnc. This way you could play games, do spreadsheets, other Windows stuff, using the video hardware on your unRAID machine. Of course you can get Plex Server running on unRAID or within a VM on unRAID to serve video to a Plex client, such as Chromecast. But the video display in this case is coming from the client hardware, not the server hardware.
April 2, 201412 yr Author The original point of the thread was to get video out from a VM. This would allow, for example, running Windows in a VM and using your unRAID server hardware to also be your Windows PC, including the video hardware output from the virtual PC instead of some sort of remote desktop such as vnc. This way you could play games, do spreadsheets, other Windows stuff, using the video hardware on your unRAID machine. Exactly! In a perfect world my setup would look like this: UnRAID box with 2 (or 3) VMs. 1 VM would be windows and would automatically load up into windows VM when the unRAID box is started. VM 2 would have Linux for all of my plugins (SB, CP, Plex) that ran in the background. (VM 3 would possibly host pfSense but ironicbadger made a good point awhile back on what you happen to all your routing if you needed to take unRAID offline for maintenance) ONE COMPUTER TO RULE THEM ALL...
April 2, 201412 yr Author I just found this thread here. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31682.0 I really need to get a test server!
April 2, 201412 yr That's my post and links through to my blog where there's plenty of info on the hardware I use etc. I've been running this setup with two windows vms since then and for the most part, it's been pretty solid.(only one of the vms uses gpu passthrough, the other is strictly vnc access). The main areas of instability are around resetting the gpu on vm restart and usb device access in vms. You absolutely need ironocbadgers start/stop scripts in place to safely eject the card from the VM on shutdown and reconnect it on startup (these scripts live in the windows VM, not on unraid). I've tried several methods of usb passthrough and found it flakey, at best. It works, mostly, but seems sensitive to combinations of hubs and devices. My use case is htpc replacement. I've one vm stacked with TV tuner cards that does nothing but schedule and record TV (mediaportal / august). The other is a win 8 client that connects via gpu to my living room TV and has a media portal interface. Usb wireless keyboard and mce remote offer control options. Soon, I hope to set up a second client vm to drive a screen in another room. That should happen this coming weekend as I plan to upgrade to unraid 6beta4 and migrate all my array from my existing system to this server. Stay tuned to the blog for progress reports. In.terms of op use case, it's absolutely possible, and very satisfying!
April 11, 201412 yr Soon, I hope to set up a second client vm to drive a screen in another room. That should happen this coming weekend as I plan to upgrade to unraid 6beta4 and migrate all my array from my existing system to this server. Stay tuned to the blog for progress reports. Hi meep, would like to hear about any updates you can post. I read your blog and must say congrats! A good, simple resume of all passthroug steps needed.
April 11, 201412 yr I've tried several methods of usb passthrough and found it flakey, at best. It works, mostly, but seems sensitive to combinations of hubs and devices. Any solution to that? Best thing to do?
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