Unraid6 VM Disk Performance

[[email protected]]

Hi,

 

I want to start off saying that things are running fine now but I am trying to figure out what I was doing wrong or if I can expect problems in the future. 

 

I installed 2 VM's to my unraid 6 build per the instructions (1 Windows 7 and 1 Windows 10 both 64bit) and everything was normal except disk usage was showing 100% and the VMs were running extremely very very slow.

 

My Build

-4th Gen Core i5 3GHz with Virtualiztion enabled

-8GB of Ram, 2GB assigned to each VM

-4x4TB HDD

-1x240GB SSH as Cache drive btrfs

 

*I followed all of the directions to the letter with the virtio drivers and setup from he lime-tech guide

 

-I installed win10 first on a Cache-Only drive, thinking it could be because of early win10 support I also did win7

-Win 7 had the exact same problem

-Reinstalled both OS's with more memory and CPU allocation but that didn't change anything

-Tweaked 'cache' settings per the KVM support site with no success

-Wiped the share, created a new cache only share and tried the whole process again and still had slowness

 

What resolved it was rebooting my hardware to go into the bios and check for missing virtualization settings(there weren't any).  When I started back up my next step was to try the cache drive as XFS but to my astonishment both OS's are now running very fast and smooth with no more 100% disk utilization.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on why this happened?  I am concerned that a hardware reboot fixed it and that it is just a matter of time before something goes wrong with the IO again.

 

Thanks for any input

[DZMM]

Did you find a solution to this?  I've just installed my first W10 VM and the disk usage is fixed at 100% even though nothing is being transferred, and the VM is barely usable.

[heratic]

Is 2GB of ram enough for a windows VM. I would have thought 4GB would be minimum. Are you sure the disk usage isn't just writing to the swap file?

[DZMM]

Is 2GB of ram enough for a windows VM. I would have thought 4GB would be minimum. Are you sure the disk usage isn't just writing to the swap file?

 

I've got 8Gb for mine and 4 real cores

[heratic]

Is 2GB of ram enough for a windows VM. I would have thought 4GB would be minimum. Are you sure the disk usage isn't just writing to the swap file?

 

I've got 8Gb for mine and 4 real cores

What virtio driver did you install and what version disk are you using

 

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

 

[DZMM]

Is 2GB of ram enough for a windows VM. I would have thought 4GB would be minimum. Are you sure the disk usage isn't just writing to the swap file?

 

I've got 8Gb for mine and 4 real cores

What virtio driver did you install and what version disk are you using

 

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

virtio-win-0.1.118-2.iso.  I'm not sure what you mean by what version disk?

VM.zip

[heratic]

I installed the vioscsi driver.  Using the 1.118-2 atm but i remember installing a earlier version because i had the same disk usage problem.  I stopped putting my VM on the cache drive and just have them on a ssd mounted with unassigned devices now. Not sure if any of that helps

[DZMM]

I've followed all the tips in the wiki such as disabling disk indexing, but my disk usage stays locked at 100%.  the machine is unusable and I really need to get this test VM working so I can buy my full licence.  I'm 6 days into my test so far and I've got all my dockers and apps working except for finding a way to get a torrent client working through a VPN), I'm moving the last of my files over to the array so I'm pretty much committed now.

 

What I've done so far:

 

- setup VM on HDD (not cache as M.2 drive not here yet and I'll add my SSD from my old machine once I've moved the last HDD and can format it) with standard settings

- installed latest Nvidia drivers - GT 710 is in 2nd slot (will try and do VM with R5 230 in 1st slot after got this one working - expect to be harder)

- followed tips in wiki like indexing, power options, disable hibernation etc etc

[phbigred]

Did you install the Win 10 anniversary update? There's issues with bugs if you let it update automatically. Do a reinstall from windows 10 anniversary ISO you can get from MS. Once I did this all my disk and hangs corrected. It may require you to reset the entire VM as there may be settings that "hang". If you reset inside Windows make sure you set the CPU count to 1 as there's a bug with KVM and the reset process.

 

 

[DZMM]

Did you install the Win 10 anniversary update? There's issues with bugs if you let it update automatically. Do a reinstall from windows 10 anniversary ISO you can get from MS. Once I did this all my disk and hangs corrected. It may require you to reset the entire VM as there may be settings that "hang". If you reset inside Windows make sure you set the CPU count to 1 as there's a bug with KVM and the reset process.

 

I downloaded a fresh ISO last week - it's version 1607 which is the anniversary edition so I installed it as a clean version

[DZMM]

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_6/VM_Guest_Support#Enable_MSI_for_Interrupts_to_Fix_HDMI_Audio_Support

 

MSI wasn't enabled on my VM.  I've enabled it on my GPU after finding the registry entry - was I supposed to do it for the audio driver as well?

[dinoaus]

You could try turning off disk caching. Change the cache to 'none' and IO to 'native' in the XML for the disk.

[DZMM]

Problem solved