Windows sleep/wake questions

[joelones]

For those that use a Windows VM on top of unRAID for desktop work, how exactly to do you manage monitor standby? Do you phyically turn off the monitor when done?

 

As sleeping a Windows VM poses a problem I've noticed, namely, how to wake it up? I'm passing through a controller with a keyboard/mouse and waking with either or does not work.

 

Moreover, does the sleeping VM even respond to "resume" (assuming you have another means of hitting the unRAID GUI)? In my testing, although the GUI notices the VM as sleeping, resuming appears to do nothing. Monitor remains in standby - I am however passing through a GPU. So not sure if that has something to do with it.

 

So is sleep supported? By the look of things, it appears that the official guide suggests to disable sleep but the GUI does recognize when the Windows VM is sleeping.

 

Thoughts?

[jonp]

For those that use a Windows VM on top of unRAID for desktop work, how exactly to do you manage monitor standby? Do you phyically turn off the monitor when done?

 

As sleeping a Windows VM poses a problem I've noticed, namely, how to wake it up? I'm passing through a controller with a keyboard/mouse and waking with either or does not work.

 

Moreover, does the sleeping VM even respond to "resume" (assuming you have another means of hitting the unRAID GUI)? In my testing, although the GUI notices the VM as sleeping, resuming appears to do nothing. Monitor remains in standby - I am however passing through a GPU. So not sure if that has something to do with it.

 

So is sleep supported? By the look of things, it appears that the official guide suggests to disable sleep but the GUI does recognize when the Windows VM is sleeping.

 

Thoughts?

 

So there's sleep, hibernation, and monitor power saving.  Hibernation is one of the things I recommend disabling in the wiki, as I don't see the point since the physical hardware underneath is still running anyway.  Sleep can be troublesome if you are passing through USB devices, because when the VM is asleep, it's in a suspend state, and that means you'd have to resume it through the webGui (moving the mouse or hitting the keyboard won't help you).

 

However, if you just want the monitor to turn off after a period of inactivity, that's definitely configurable within Windows without using hibernation or sleep.

[joelones]

Thanks.

 

For some reason resuming from the GUI wasn't working for me. The icon on the GUI indeed changed to the green play icon but monitor remained in standby.

[garycase]

There's no need to use either sleep or hibernation, as Jon said => these are effectively meaningless concepts when the machine is virtualized, as the host is still running.    There shouldn't be any problem having the display turn off after a specified period -- it should simply turn back on with any mouse-click or key press.

 

[JonathanM]

There's no need to use either sleep or hibernation, as Jon said => these are effectively meaningless concepts when the machine is virtualized, as the host is still running.

I would like the option to hibernate the VM when the host is shutting down instead of the current behaviour. I've been playing with a windows VM with multiple RDP logins, and it would be handy to leave those sessions intact and hibernate the VM when I need to do maintenance on the host.

[jonp]

I would like the option to hibernate the VM when the host is shutting down instead of the current behaviour. I've been playing with a windows VM with multiple RDP logins, and it would be handy to leave those sessions intact and hibernate the VM when I need to do maintenance on the host.

 

So what happens when you try to use Windows hibernation right now?  Does it work?

[JonathanM]

I would like the option to hibernate the VM when the host is shutting down instead of the current behaviour. I've been playing with a windows VM with multiple RDP logins, and it would be handy to leave those sessions intact and hibernate the VM when I need to do maintenance on the host.

 

So what happens when you try to use Windows hibernation right now?  Does it work?

If I choose hibernate from the menu in windows, it works fine. I tried setting the power button settings in windows control panel to hibernate when the power button is pushed, but the stop setting in the webui still triggers a full shutdown.

[jonp]

I see.  I'll look into this, I think there may be a way to do this...

[JonathanM]

I see.  I'll look into this, I think there may be a way to do this...

The virsh save and restore should accomplish the same thing, only with the requirement of a save file location. Bonus points because you can "hibernate" VM's that don't support hibernation natively. I was hoping the save and restore functionality would be the default behavior when the array was stopped non-interactively, for example during a power failure that triggered the UPS shutdown or similar situation.

 

For previous versions of unraid before the native hypervisor was fleshed out I wrote a little virtualbox script that hibernated all my running virtualbox guests on array shutdown, and that worked quite well.

[jonp]

Yup, that's exactly what I need to mess around with in the lab.

[Capt.Insano]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I found this thread while wondering the same thing:

 

Is it possible to set KVM/lib-virt to hibernate a VM rather than shut it down if triggered through the host eg. (Stop Array) but still shutdown if given an explicit shutdown command through host or from within VM itself?

 

Probably not, but I would love to preserve my windows VM in hibernation if the array needs to be stopped for some reason.