I am about to try out to install Win7 in a VM. Had a few questions before pulling the trigger:

 

1) I saw in the wiki that I can point it to an existing Win7 installation. In this case, would it copy all data on this disk or just use the reference for the Windows ID?

 

2) Would this process require me to buy another Win7 license or can I use the license from the existing install?

 

3) Can I access the array and easily copy between drives inside the array. They are in XPS, so not sure whether Win7 in the VM can read/write to them easily?

 

4) Can I boot directly in the VM and the array is still active in background?

 

5) Does Windows Remote Desktop work and can I run the whole thing headless and access from another notebook?

 

 

Thanks in advance!!!

For converting a physical windows install to a virtual one, please read through and follow this procedure:

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Physical_to_Virtual_Machine_Conversion_Process

 

You may end up having to reactivate the license with Microsoft.  It really depends on the kind of license you have (OEM or otherwise).

 

What is in XPS?  You can definitely access the array from within the VM to copy files around.

 

You can boot up into unRAID with a policy set to auto start the VM after the array is started.

 

Yes you can run the whole thing headless and use remote desktop protocol for this. See this video:

 

Very cool, thanks for your reply. This is helpful.

 

The disks in my array are formatted in XPS file format. I would have expected Windows to have some problems reading and writing to these disks? From what you say, this would not be an issue?

 

Two more questions:

 

1) Is Win 8.1 still the best supported OS for VM on Unraid 6? What about Win 7 or Win 10?

 

2) When setting up the VM, I can only select VNC, but not the GPU on my mobo. Am I missing anything or is that not possible?

 

 

Thanks!!!

Ok, I think you mean xfs.  The way a Windows VM would write to an array device is over an SMB connection.  You can browse to your server from windows over SMB by opening file explorer and typing //tower in the address bar (I might have those slashes backwards). This let's you see all the user shares.

 

As far as GPU, see the wiki about GPU assignment or the website under support -> hardware recommendations.  Tldr: you can only assign an add-on GPU to a VM.

Ah got it, this answers my question. Thanks! What about Win7 vs Win8.1 vs Win10?

 

And one more thing about SMB. When I copy files between two NTFS disks over SMB connection, will this be fast or will this require the files to copied over the network?

Ah got it, this answers my question. Thanks! What about Win7 vs Win8.1 vs Win10?

 

And one more thing about SMB. When I copy files between two NTFS disks over SMB connection, will this be fast or will this require the files to copied over the network?

Win 8.1 is still best as its my primary system. I will be testing win 10 soon.

 

When you have a VM, you will have a virtual disk device for it that will look like a big .img file on unRAID.  That vdisk will appear as the C: drive in Windows. The only things that need to be in that C: drive are Windows and maybe a few apps, but your user data should be saved over an SMB connection to a user share, which will then write the files directly to the array on an XFS device. Then you can access those files even if the VM is offline (from another device on your network).

Also, when you are accessing an unRAID user share over SMB, you will be going through a network layer, but the traffic isn't going through your physical router or switch...it is routed through the internal bridge to the virtual network adapter in the VM.

Thanks for your quick reply. Sorry, I am having a hard time to express my question clearly.

 

I have data disks in the array (let's assume 16 of them). From what I read, I can mount these 16 disks from the array as disks accessible through the VM over SMB. If I copy from disk A to disk B, will this be as fast as with a native Windows solution with local disks? Or does the SMB protocol require me to copy the disks somehow over my home LAN. For example, I can now access over SMB these files over the network from my notebook computer. But copying from drive A to drive B takes ages as it copies it from server disk A to notebook to server disk B. I can of course use the command line to speed this up, but was hoping that this may no longer be required after having the VM up and running.

i think our post overlapped. So, the internal bridge will allow this to be as fast as copying from one local file to another local file (and no need over the network)?

Write performance to any disk in the array is going to be bottlenecked by parity operations (typically 30-40 MB/s).  Read operations go at full speed and write operations to a cache will be much faster as well.  Those read and write to cache operations are NOT limited by the speed of your network because the VM can talk to the host internally.

 

When accessing unRAID shares over the network from a different device, the copper network (typically 1gbps) becomes the bottleneck for reads and cache writes.

 

Got it, that would be the same bottleneck I would also have when copying via command line? So, the VM does not make things slower compared to going through command line?

 

Thanks again, really appreciate all the help bringing me up to speed!

Got it, that would be the same bottleneck I would also have when copying via command line? So, the VM does not make things slower compared to going through command line?

 

Thanks again, really appreciate all the help bringing me up to speed!

That's correct and no problem!