(new user) Unraid 6.6.6 setup problems

[Dav3]

Hi!

I'm a new user to Unraid.  I've run into a few problems and hope someone can help me out.  Apologies in advance for my newb-ness and these may be answered questions - I've tried half-heartedly searching for answers on this forum but haven't come up with what I need to get my server going.

 

My basic setup:  8700K on an ASUS Z370E Gaming motherboard with 64GB RAM and a GTX-1080 video card.  Virtualization features enabled in BIOS (UEFI, latest version).  Installed UNRAID 6.6.6 onto a USB drive (obviously).  I've configured a 4TB Seagate HDD as a storage device (sorry, don't recall the actual model & unraid terminology at the moment) and a 1TB 840 EVO SSD as a cache drive.

 

Background:  I've been following the instructional videos posted by @SpaceInvaderOne to set up my server and run into problems.  I've precleared and setup the basic server and installed the recommended plugins as per @SpaceInvaderOnerecommendations.  Hey by the way @SpaceInvaderOne thanks for making your videos, they're great!

 

Ok, I've run into basically three issues, listed here in increasing priority:

 

1. Initial LAN performance:  This may be more of a symptom and isn't a deal-killer but here it is.  Upon exporting the I ISOS share and copying a Windows ISO file into it, I noticed really bad performance.  Like 5MB/sec.  On the exact same hardware (client, server & network) I usually get at least 50MB/sec when transferring big monolithic files like ISOs in Windows.  Everything LAN & HDD related is pretty much default settings.  Is there something I'm doing wrong?  I was expecting better performance, even though I don't have a real RAID storage subsystem setup yet.

 

2. Boot order:  This may be an unfixable BIOS issue but I'd like to boot UNRAID whenever the USB Compact Flash drive is inserted.  I changed the boot order to make the USB drive first and that works until I remove it and boot Windows (on an NVME drive).  When I re-insert the USB UNRAID drive and reboot the BIOS boots Windows instead of UNRAID off the USB drive.  It forces me into sitting there and hitting F8 to get back into UNRAID.  Is there a way to force the BIOS to permanently prefer booting off the USB drive whenever it's inserted?

 

Below are the deal-killer issues for me===>>>

 

3a. VM Setup Part-1:  When setting up a new Windows 10 VM, it goes great until I try to boot the VM.  I hit a key to boot the install media but the VM ends up at a UEFI BIOS shell> prompt instead of booting the ISO.  The ISO is the original Windows 1809 bits from Microsoft and I've used the ISO to install Windows (bare metal) before so I think the bits are good.  There is no error message, but a list of enumerated devices and the prompt.  What am I doing wrong here?  A possibly related issue is I had to manually start the VNC session to the desktop myself.

 

3b. VM Setup Part-2:  Trying to work around the issue, I set the graphics device to the GTX1080 and the HDD to the NVME drive that has Windows already installed on it.  Booting this results in an "INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DISK" blue-screen.  Although I followed instructions to create/fix/copy/use the VGA BIOS for the video card and that appears to work great I might have messed up and followed @SpaceInvaderOne 's instructions on setting up an NVME drive that applied to an older version of UNRAID but not to 6.6.6.  However, I don't recall what I edited (I think it was the raw XML) and can't seem to find the place in his many videos where he gave instructions on this so I can't figure out how to reverse the edit.

 

3c.  VM Setup Part-3:  (Ok, I'm blatantly cheating on my problem-count here)  I can't seem to stop a running VM.  When I hit STOP in the drop-down menu for a VM, it's icon changes to a circling reddish thingy for a minute, then it's status goes back to green-triangle 'running' status thingy instead of red-square.  Again, is it me?  Am I doing something wrong here??

 

So I'm stuck...  I think I'm going to really like UNRAID if I can just get past these newb issues and get things running.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

 

-Dav3

 

And hey, by the way, thanks you guys for putting in the hard work to make this magic software accessible to us mere mortals.  Hopefully you'll help the world (me included) break their addiction to Windows/etc and lead us to a better, more OPEN place. 

Edited December 21, 2018 by Dav3
duh

[Squid]

3 hours ago, Dav3 said:

3a. VM Setup Part-1: 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/55887-unable-to-create-vm-just-boots-to-uefi-shell/?tab=comments#comment-686705

3 hours ago, Dav3 said:

VM Setup Part-3: 

Is the VM still doing something (ie: is Windows doing its thing and installing its Updates)

 

3 hours ago, Dav3 said:

1. Initial LAN performance: 

Post diagnostics

[Dav3]

Hey @SquidI just wanted to say thanks for helping out.  I've resolved several of the above issues.  Most of the solutions were either user- or setup-specific and probably not worth writing up since they were rather convoluted.

Anyway, thanks for the help and merry Xmas.