VM server f. Win10 VMs for production environment - USB host controller issues

[Marcel]

Hi,

 

inspired by Linus Sebastian's video about the two gaming rigs on one PC I want to create VM server for various Windows and other machines on a new rig using unRAID.

 

The target is to not have a “normal” Windows installation anymore but just use different installations on VMs instead.

The system will be used both for office work and engineering software, simulation, software development and video editing.

 

(I had once tried something like this long ago using just a minimal Win7 installation as a host for multiple VMs using VMWare but without proper passthrough mechanism performance was just not good enough. Also management was not ideal.)

 

I have compared Hyper-V Server, ESXi, Xen Server and unRAID before deciding on unRAID.

Main reason: unRAID doesn't swallow up much performance so I don’t necessarily need server grade expensive hardware. Also manageability over the web interface seems to be great and there is a very active community.

For some of the other products the future is somewhat unclear unless you go down the full enterprise road and buy all the expensive management packages the respective companies offer.

 

Until I watched Linus’s video I had never heard of unRAID but I have been experimenting with it for two days now and I am just amazed.

 

I ran into some issues though:

 

Using the stable unRAID 6.1.9 I just couldn't get any mouse to run within the Win10 VM. I tried my Roccat Kone cable gaming mouse as well as different wireless keyboard/mouse combos and also my Apple keyboard and mouse (ASUS Bluetooth USB dongle).

 

So I bought a cheap USB cable mouse and I upgraded unRAID to 6.2 beta 23.

Upgrade went through without a hitch.

 

Noticeable improvements:

• before the unRAID web GUI was displaying 16GB of RAM installed with 8GB being allocated. Now it correctly shows the only 8GB installed.
  
• graphics passthrough seems to be a bit more stable (before I had blank screens when turning on an VM quite often)
  
• mouse is working within VMs now
  
• previously after each reboot the SSD drive used as cache was unassigned. that is fixed now.
  

 

Here comes the but….

 

While installing Window 10 Pro 64 bit went through without a hitch previously, now it stops right after Windows says files are being prepared for installation.

The unRAID system log shows the always the same error message which comes directly after some text about usb devices.

 

Jun 17 14:48:01 MVMRIG kernel: traps: qemu-system-x86[4652] trap int3 ip:2b611dfc6da3 sp:7ffdf7786d90 error:0

 

So it is probably related to the USB host controller passthrough (?).

 

I have tried different setups with the VM having both mouse and keyboard checked specifically for passthrough or just the keyboard. Also varied the USB hostcontroller (2.0/3.0).

Always the same result. VM shuts down and the system log shows the above error message.

 

To keep it simple the attached system log is made right after the start (and shutdown because of the error) of the Win10 VM, having the USB3.0 host controller selected and only the keyboard attached to the server and selected specifically for the VM.

 

I have tried the Fix Common Problems plugin. It did not find anything.

 

[EDIT: I have changed the UEFI setting "XHCI Hand-off" to enabled. It didn't help.]

 

unRAID version: 6.2 beta 23, no additional plugins besides webGUI.

 

The hardware used:

 

• ASUS B150M-C Motherboard (latest UEFI version)
  
• Intel i3-6100 CPU
  
• 8GB Black Fury Hyper-X DDR4 RAM
  
• ASUS GTX950-M-2GD5 discrete graphics for the VMs
  
• Skylake Intel HD 530 internal graphics for unRAID console
  

 

• For testing I am using a config with 1 SSD for cache and 2 HDD’s for the array (1 parity).
  
• The target system will have 4 HDD’s (1 parity) for the array and 2 SSD for cache. One of those will hold all the VM system disks as cache only.
  

mvmrig-diagnostics-20160617-1453.zip