I am somewhere around halfway through my trial period, seeing if Unraid is going to be something I can use for my personal computer.

Here are the things I am intending to do with Unraid (let me know if these seem unrealistic):

• Serve a 24/7 NAS to my LAN
  
• Run my regular desktop environment in a VM (passthrough of onboard audio, along with GPU)
  
• Create occasional snapshots of my VMs (I am OK with doing this from the command line)
  

 

My motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3

My CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T

 

So far, the NAS portion seems to work just fine. I have been able to read and write from the shares using a laptop.

I have also managed to install Windows 7 (64 bit) in a VM, and as far as I can tell the GPU and audio passthrough are both working since I am able to see and hear.

 

The problem I am running into is with the network connection in my VM.

Fresh installs of Windows 7 on my motherboard have always started out unable to detect a network connection. I am used to this, and so I have my motherboard's network driver handy on a flash drive.

The problem, though, is that the driver software doesn't recognize supported network hardware, and so does not complete its installation process.

I would guess that this has something to do with the virtualization, but if the host were completely faking the connection, I would expect Windows to recognize it.

 

I have also briefly tried installing my other primary OS (Antergos) in a VM, however the boot process for the live installer fails. I am not super worried about this, since I am willing to hop between different Linux distros. The Windows installation is the main showstopper for me right now.

 

I'm guessing I'll need to provide more information, but I'm not sure which things are important. Just let me know what you need and I'll try to supply it.

After the VM is up and running you need to install the drivers for the virtual network connection.  In device manager, just tell Windows to search for drivers on the VIRTIO disk that's mounted on the couple of devices that will be showing as not installed.

Thank you, that worked. In retrospect, I don't think I read the guides thoroughly enough.