Hi Everyone!  I am happy to say that I was able to successfully build my unRAID server and windows 10 VM, on an AMD platform, this week.  That being said, I have some questions regarding the VM, some general house keeping:

 

1)  To shut down or restart the VM, I am assuming I must use the VM manager in the WebGUI to stop/restart the VM?  I cannot do it through the windows VM itself.

 

2)  I started with a primairy vdisk of 25GB, when I download applications should I not be saving these applications (such as adobe CC) to Program Files and save them into a separate share on the server?  Something like a VM Application Share and map that share as a network drive to the VM.

 

3) If want to shut down the entire tower, do I need to stop the VM first, then stop the array, then power down?

 

4)  Are there any recommendations for software out there to monitor CPU temps etc on a VM?

 

I think this is all I have for now, I'm honestly just stoked I was able to get everything working with no hiccups.

You can do normal shutdown / restart / whatever from Start -> Power menu in Win10. You can also do Stop / Restart of VM from webGui and that should issue Shutdown / Restart signal to guest OS but why would you do that when you already are in that guest OS?

 

Regarding applications installed in Win10 you can put them wherever you want. I personally put all applicaions on VM's vdisk (resize vdisk when needed more space) while documents, media files, etc. go to share that all VMs have access to. Installing applications to separate vdisk makes no sense because you need that disk space anyway and when VM gets corrupted and you need to reinstall OS you will need to install them again, right?

 

I think stopping array stops VMs by sending Stop to them but maybe that's just wishful thinking, I never checked it myself.

1)  To shut down or restart the VM, I am assuming I must use the VM manager in the WebGUI to stop/restart the VM?  I cannot do it through the windows VM itself.

 

2)  I started with a primairy vdisk of 25GB, when I download applications should I not be saving these applications (such as adobe CC) to Program Files and save them into a separate share on the server?  Something like a VM Application Share and map that share as a network drive to the VM.

 

3) If want to shut down the entire tower, do I need to stop the VM first, then stop the array, then power down?

 

4)  Are there any recommendations for software out there to monitor CPU temps etc on a VM?

1. Based on the question, I suspect you are accessing the VM via RDP? That's the only thing I can think of that would prevent you from doing it from the VM (i.e. since RDP would remove the shutdown / restart command from the start menu).

 

If you are on RDP, the only way that I know of is to press Win-R (to trigger the Run command) and then type:

To shut down

shutdown -s -t 1

To restart

shutdown -r -t 1

You can create a shortcut for the command too. The number at the back is the wait time. 1 = 1s => practically immediately. You can change it to higher values for longer delay.

 

2. Yes. However, 25GB for Win 10 image is a bit too small in my opinion. Windows tend to bloat even if you install apps outside of main vdisk.

 

3. Recommended to manually stop VM first, just to be safe. However, you don't have to do it - I have accidentally done it with multiple VMs on before with no ill effect - but they all were idling.

Thanks for the responses.  I am accessing the VM via GPU passthrough and not through RDP.  I am new to VM's however and was not sure if the restart/shutdown options within the VM itself were functional.  Sounds like they operate normally however. 

Thanks for the responses.  I am accessing the VM via GPU passthrough and not through RDP.  I am new to VM's however and was not sure if the restart/shutdown options within the VM itself were functional.  Sounds like they operate normally however.

 

Yes you can just shutdown the vm as if it was a normal computer from the desktop.