Greetings, all.

 

I am building a new high-end gaming/development rig, and want to use unRAID for it, but the system architecture I am shooting for is a bit different than normal, and I have been having various issues trying to set up unRAID on it. I would like to first explain what I originally wanted to do and why, and then what I have tried so far, and see if I am going about things in a "good" way that leads me towards my goals with the system.

 

First, I am a long-time Linux/Windows admin and developer, so feel free to get as technical as you think is appropriate. If there is something I don't understand, believe me, I will ask.

 

This system is a replacement for my 6 year-old XP workhorse, and I have been planning for it for about two years now, thinking about what I want and how I want to set it up. I came across unRAID some months ago, and have been studying it for some time. It appears to provide me with most everything I need, and I want to use it for this new system.

 

The system is an X99 intel i7-5960 with 64GB memory, a 4TB HDD, 1TB SSD, and a 512GB M.2 NMVe SSD module. It is intended to be a high-end gaming system as well as a software development platform for me (I do virtual world/game development on Windows/Linux). I will be running Windows 8.1 and Linux Mint Cinnamon VMs, plus potentially a few docker apps for test servers. As far as my storage setup goes, the design was to use the 1TB SSD for OS and program executables / configs, and the 4TB HDD for data and user profiles (yes, I am aware of the issues with Windows and moving the user profiles around). The concept was based on the notion to reduce "wear" on the SSD, while making the boot-up and loading run as fast as possible. The NVMe SSD drive is meant solely to be a data drive for unRAID.. storing ISOs VM images, docker templates and apps, etc. More or less, it would be a private "protected store" for the Dom0.

 

After researching and reading through the setup documentation, I discovered I need to use the 6.2 beta (currently trying beta 21) so it sees the NVMe drive. I also noted from the manual that SSDs can only be private non-array drives or cache drives, not data/parity drives. This is fine for the NVMe drive, because it will just be mounted like normal (I wish I could make unRAID boot from it instead of the USB key, but I understand the need for a "license dongle", so that's not a big deal right now).

 

I also realize that, right now, I am not truly taking advantage of unRAID since I am not using a parity drive yet.. it's planned, but the important thing I want for now is the virtualization and multi-OS support. I really would like to have the SSD as a data disk, but the manual warns against it, and recommends using it for cache. Since I think there is (or should be) a way to do what I want to do going the SSD cache (only) route, I am trying that for now.

 

So far, I have been able to get unRAID booted, and have set up an unprotected array with the 4TB HDD as the single data drive, the 1TB SSD as cache, and the NVMe SSD just mounted as an unassigned device. I have set up and enabled Docker and VMs, but when I go to create a new Windows 8.1 VM, I get through all the settings, create two vDisks, assigned from two shares I created. One named "WinSys" cache-only, and the other named "WinData", not cached (for now). The WinSys vdisk is set for 250GB, and the WinData vdisk for 1TB. When I try to create the VM, I get an error:

 

"VM creation error

 

Error creating disk image '/mnt/user/WinSys/Windows 8.1/vdisk1.img': qemu-img: /mnt/user/WinSys/Windows 8.1/vdisk1.img: Could not create file: No such file or directory"

 

Syslog shows:

Archaea shfs/user: share cache full

Archaea shfs/user: shfs_mkdir: assign_disk: WinSys/Windows 8.1 (28) No space left on device

 

Testing just mkdir in the share folder gives the same error message. Checking the mount list, everything shows it is mounted in rw, so it's not a RO problem, I don't think. The drives are all brand-new and blank, formatted in unRAID using XFS as the default. I am presuming that the vdisk creation is for the "drives" that will become C: and D: (boot and data), where windows will store its files. However, I may be getting confused by the nomenclature. I certainly would welcome any technical details about what's going on "under-the-hood" with this in unRAID.

 

A few other issues I have noticed:

 

1) Audio Device detection for VM passthrough. The VM page screen shows two audio devices in the list for passthrough: one is the Intel C610/X99 series chipset HD Audio Controller (00:1b:0), and the other is the HDMI audio on my R9 390X video card. The motherboard has a Realtek ALC1150 7.1 high-def audio chip on it, which doesn't appear in the list, unless it is being represented as the Intel one. Not sure if this is an issue yet, as I haven't been able to get a VM to be created thus far.

2) When on the Main page, the text console spams "SG_IO: questionable sense data, results may be incorrect" about once a second, likely because it is trying to get SMART data from the NVMe SSD while on that page, and smartmontools doesn't quite have full NVMe support yet (though it appears it is now slated to be in Release 6.5, as of yesterday: https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/657 ). It is annoying when you're trying to work on the text console, but navigating away from the Main page makes it stop.

3) I noticed a potential emhttp hang bug. If you are in one of the mounted drives in the text console (cd /mnt/user, for example), and you try to stop the array with the GUI, it will hang with a repeating error across the bottom of the page. It keeps retrying, but even if you cd out of the drive, back to /, for example, it continues to error out because it already unmounted the other drives, and them erroring out keeps it retrying. I ended up rebooting, as I couldn't seem to find the magic restart commands for emhttp.

 

Anyway, the main thing I want to do now is to just get a working Windows 8.1 VM running. Normally, I try to beat my brains out with everything I can using my Google-Fu and RTFM/RTFF to figure things out, but I think I have kinda hit a wall here. Any help or advice to get me over the initial hurdles will be greatly appreciated.

Some updates:

 

I figured out several of the issues I was having. The one with being unable to create the VM was due to a quirk of the webGUI for entering minimum free space for the shares. When I originally created them, I typed "50GB" into the field, and when I saved it, it turned into "50000000". Since there were no units specified, I presumed it meant "bytes", so I corrected it to 50000000000 and saved it again. When I checked it yesterday, it showed the value as "50TB", which is, of course, wrong, and an impossible amount of free space. When I corrected it this time, "50GB" turned into "50000000" for just a second and then back to "50GB" when saved. Apparently, the default units are kb, and there is some input validation going on which appears to be a bit flaky. Anyway, once I specified a realistic minimum free space and got it to save, it allowed me to create the VM (as well as directories, files, etc) on the share.

 

I was able to get the Windows 8.1 VM to create, but not with the video card passthrough, so I had to use VNC for the time being. I was able to get it installed, but when I did a bunch of updates from Windows Update for it, it got hung in a boot loop of failing to install an update and rolling it back, as well as numerous strange failures when I tried to do them a few at a time. I am going to redo the windows 8.1 install from scratch again and then do the updates one at a time, to see which one(s) fail and how they fail. I want to figure out if it is something to do with the VM or if it is something to do with the config I am using.

 

In the meantime, with a working Windows 8.1 setup, I tried to get the video card to work, following all the various recommendations in the manual. Everything up until I supplied the video BIOS ("the last resort") would blank the screen, and would hang the VM (no video output, no numlock light toggle on the assigned keyboard, which is usually a good sign of Windows hanging on boot). When I supplied the BIOS file, I was able to get a video signal to the monitors, but it remained a black screen. The difference this time was that it appeared to respond to keyboard input, as the numlock light toggled.

 

Another issue I noted in the WebGUI is that editing the VM config causes the Primary vDisk to get set to "None", if you have more than one defined. It has to be set back to Manual each time before saving, and it remembers the file path for the image file, so I don't have to re-specify it.

 

Anyway, I'm at the point now where I can get VMs going, just a matter of getting the VMs to recognize and use the hardware I have. The Windows 8.1 Pro VM I used OVMF and have tried both i440fx and Q35 machine types.

 

Just for info, here's my detailed hardware setup:

 

MSI X99A "godlike gaming" motherboard

Intel i7-5960X 3GHz 8-core 16-thread CPU

64GB Corsair DDR4-3333 memory

Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB NMVe SSD M.2

HGST 4TB HDD

Sapphire Nitro R9-390X 8GB GDDR5 GPU

Pioneer BDXL  Blue-ray burner

Corsair AXi 1200W PSU

 

BIOS Settings, I have all the virtualization options set as per the manual, and have set the video card and motherboard to UEFI mode.

 

As before, any advice or suggestions are most welcome. Thank you for your time and attention.