Why are VM's so much hard work?

[stutaylor]

Really considering moving away from unraid at the moment, at least for VM's. 

 

Firstly the pass through, tried to pass an nvidia gtx 670 through to a Windows 10 VM, not happy, i have it set up so i can rdp in too it but when select the gpu it shows it booting but i can't actually get in too it.  Unable to turn the hyper-v option off that every recommends as a first step, if i set it to off and save changes it re-enables itself.

 

Also have a ubuntu VM and today out of nowhere it started but no network, when watch it boot get " a start job is running for raise network" then after 5 minutes it times out. 

 

Only changes i've made lately are nic teaming in r-r mode (i have a managed switch) however the bridge name remains the same and all VM's show the same bridge name.  It just feels such an uphill struggle to get unraid VM's to work.  I want them to "just work" not them randomly stop working one day or not work at all :(

[Squid]

VM passthrough is highly dependent upon all of the hardware, BIOS versions etc in the server.  Not every combination works.  Myself, I'm old school and feel that a VM should always be hardware agnostic, and therefore I do not utilize any passthrough with any VM

[1812]

1 hour ago, stutaylor said:

Firstly the pass through, tried to pass an nvidia gtx 670

Firstly, this gen of Nvidia card doesn't like to be used in a virtual machine. Use GPU's that are 7 series and higher.

 

1 hour ago, stutaylor said:

It just feels such an uphill struggle to get unraid VM's to work.  I want them to "just work" not them randomly stop working one day or not work at all

If you don't follow any guides, you increase your difficulty. I have zero problems with reliability in my VM's, running several across several machines, all using different kinds of hardware passthrough. Was it "easy" to setup, no, but it also wasn't that hard.  

 

If you feel there is a simpler solution for your VM needs, then perhaps you should move to it. But as it stands, this is almost the simplest method short of using VM ware. But the tradeoff is using more system resources in the virtualization process.

[bonienl]

When you take hardware passthru and dependency out of the picture, it becomes very simple and straightforward to set up VMs with Unraid.

I have several VMs running and it took literally a couple of minutes to get them up and running.

VMs can be complex depending on what you try to achieve and the actual hardware at hand.

 

[AntaresUK]

On 10/10/2019 at 2:36 PM, stutaylor said:

  I want them to "just work" not them randomly stop working one day or not work at all

I feel your pain, I have had many VMs fail mainly of the Windows 7 and XP variety but there have been some win 10 ones also.  I stick to Windows 10 now

Here's the thing, because of Nvidia not wanting to allow virtualisation on their consumer gpus you are pretty limited in your selection of a type 1 hypervisor. I tried proxmox but after wading through a huge tutorial I am back to unraid. Vmware is out because of the nvidia issue. AMD cards still suffers from the GPU reset bug

Unraid is the easiest to get working and as others have said you can make it as complicated or simple as you want to.

Im sure things like snapshots are coming, these can already be done on linux vms with btrfs but it would be great to be able to right click a vm and choose snapshot - like you can in vmware workstation

Edited October 11, 2019 by AntaresUK

[raidserver]

Not sure about nVidia 670, can you test a newer card? 980 + 1060 successful with Supermicro motherboard. Nothing needed other than choosing it within the template. Enter server BIOS and select iGPU onboard graphics to boot first which hands off the GPU for passthrough. No video output if you havent done this, windows starts loading then black screen.

 

I couldnt be happier with Win10 VM`s. Easily passthrough SSD`s & USB devices ie: XBOX wireless for gaming 15metres away from the server