Windows 10 Lite Kurulumu
Odina Conkright
Hi, Guys. This is the first part of a two-part video about setting up a Windows 10 KVM VM in unRAID. (second part in a day or 2 if work lets me !) The first part deals with setting up the VM correctly to be able to use as a 'daily driver'. Then the second part passing through hardware to turn it into a gaming VM.
Download a windows 10 iso.
Where to Buy a license for windows 10 pro for $20
How to assign resources and correctly pin you CPUs.
How to install the virtio drivers including the qxl graphics driver.
How to remove or block the windows 10 data mining - phone home - etc with anti beacon.
How to install multiple useful programmes with ninite
Using Splashtop desktop for good quality remote viewing
How to install a virtual sound card to have sound in Splashtop/RDP etc.
Using mapped drives and symlinks to get the most out of the array.
Windows tweaks for VM compatibility.
general tips
Hope you find it useful
You suggest only setting up a small vdisk for the vm. Yet you choose 70gb. I normally set mine up as only 30gb, and I still have 18gb free after getting Win10 N Pro 1703 creators update all set up. Yes Creators Update 1703 N only uses 12gb after install. Why do you want so much free space?
You are suggesting a different install process than what is in the wiki. Adding the other virt io drivers later is faster, and it works well.. Should we be modifying the wiki for your new faster install process??
Windows recommends a minimum of 20 gigs of free space. But I think its useful to have 10 - 20 gigs more than that for temporary files and the desktop etc. I often have video /image files of up to 10 gigs. I may work on these on the desktop before putting on the array. Also, the vdisk size will be different to the file size on the disk until the vdisk is filled.
Great Video! You nailed the VM provisioning. I actually picked up some tips for Windows from this video. I especially like the Windows 10 'Phone Home' removal software. This is the kind of tool to help the new unRAID user. Great job!
1 - many users are using Dockers for downloading as well as Plex, with Plex being pretty resource intensive at certain times. And most people would have 4 cores not 8. And 16G our RAM is probably most common. For a user that wants a basic Windows VM (non-gaming) how would you recommend provisioning CPU and RAM? Is there a minimum recommended Windows config that won't slow down Plex?
2 - I've always thought that splitting a core between host and VM could be a good thing. For example, if you have a VM with 1 thread from each of two cores, and unRaid owned the others, unRaid would still have access to all of the cores for transcoding, a good thing if the Windows VM is often idle. Why the recommendation to pin complete cores to VMs and not share them, in essence taking them out of the game even if lightly used much of the time.
Thanks again for this and your other videos! Great resources for unRaid users!! I plan to use this one and the one on online backups in the next few weeks, after completing my current drive upgrade cycle.
When assigning resources to VMs and Docker Containers it is as much as an art as it is a science. It is best to experiment to find what works best for you but following certain principles. After the second part to this video I am realising a video about server, Docker container and vm tuning alot of which based off @dlandon excellent tips and tweaks plugin
By default, each Docker container can access the whole of the server's resources as the host OS seems fit. So this includes all cores of the CPU. This is the case even if you have pinned the vCPUs in the VM. The pinning of the vCPUs in the VM just tells the VM it can only use those cores for its processes. However, it doesn't stop the host OS from being able to use them. So even pinning 3 out of the 4 cores for the VM will not slow down Plex that much unless the VM starts doing some heavy number crunching. It really isn't much different to if you ran a plex server on a bare-metal Windows machine. Plex would work fine, but then if you started rendering some video files in a video editing software it will effect plex as each process will have to "wait its turn" for the use of the CPU.
Now you can isolate cores from the host OS by adding isolcpus= and the numbers of the threads. This will stop the host system using these and you can assign them VMs or Docker containers manually. So then yes this would take them 'out of the game' as they would then only be used by whatever is pinned to them
The reason it is best, with a VM, not to split hyperthreaded cores is to stop context switching between hyperthreads. This wouldn't be so much of a problem for a vm that you don't game on or watch video on.
1 - I know that unRAID prefers core0, so as a result I had avoided pinning VM cores there. In an earlier incarnation of unRAID VM a couple years ago (Xen), there were cases where core0 would get overloaded and unRAID would starve and fail. Is that a concern with KVM? Assuming no, I will start using core0 for VMs. (I had not been assigning Dockers by core or load, but may start to look at that).
2 - We continue to recommend that cores be pinned with their hyperthreaded twins. There are cases where multiple cores cause problems, and I can only pin one logical core. Does it matter whether pinning core0 vs its twin? What is the negative of assigning one VM to one core, and another to its twin? (I know its not recommended, just don't understand exactly why and if you had done any testing.)
3 - Very interesting approach of having multiple Docker containers linked to same appdata. (I had done this when moving to a different Docker for the same app). Makes sense to have a "High Transcode" configuration for Plex! You'd want to update to the next version in tandem (although you could update one, check it out to make sure it is working properly, and only then update the other). And be careful to not let them run together, as you said.
1) For what kind of updates do I need to reduce the cores to 1? I have done so when installing the Win10 VM, but not sure whether this is required again for the "normal" daily Windows patches and updates? Or the upcoming Creators update?
2) Why do you suggest a small vdisk? Is it per se better to map network disks within the VM for file storage? I am a heavy user of Itunes. Is there any difference or preferred method in having the itunes library within the vdisk (VM) or on a mapped network drive?
3) I am about to start a Mac High Sierra VM (thanks for guidance in the other thread). When it comes to vdisk size, do I need to start a large 1TB vidks or is there also some way to do this with a small 70GB vdisk? It loks that Mac OS lacks the capability to auto-mount network disks at startup and also Photos library apparently cannot run on a non-Mac native file system. So, I better have it all inside the vdisk?
2 - this is personal preference to a degree, but the best practice is to keep the vdisk lean and store your data on the array, or in an unassigned device. The vdisk contains the OS and installed programs only. The vdisk is easier to back up and all your data is externalitied, with the important parts parity protected.
3 - Not a Mac guy, but I'd experiment with options to externalize. You can create a second vdisk if desired. For my Windows VM, I wanted to keep my TEMP folder off the SSD, so created a vdisk on an unassigned spinner. (Windows was not happy with TEMP folder on a network drive, even if mapped to a drive letter.) But if you want the iTunes library on your OS vdisk, you can certainly do that. I just like to be able to compress and backup my image file, and having a 1T image would be completely impractical for me.
As an added tip I would also consider using direct passthrough for your SSD/NVME drive to the Windows 10 VM. In the past, whenever I provisioned a W10 VM using vfio scsi driver / raw image, i ran in to random audio 'crackle & pop' issues even when using msiutil. Passing through an nvme meant i could also use samsung nvme driver for optimal performance.
My SSD/NVME is the cache disk. It carries two vdisks (one is the VM for MacOS and one the VM for Win10). Is this not a good setup? With my setup, I don't think I can even passthrough teh SSD/NVME as the vdisks are on the SSD/NVME?
I'm not sure if this was addressed in the videos, but for the gaming VM, what are the physical connections? The second video still seems to show the VM running under Splashtop. Would the gaming be done via Splashtop? This seems unlikely to produce near bare metal performance.
The way I'm thinking about it, for Splashtop or, say, RDP, I just need a PC that is on the same network as the unRAID server (or can "see" it over the Internet). But the monitor of the PC I'm using would be connected to whatever graphics device I use on the PC, and is therefore totally independent of any graphics card I have on the server. So if I want to use the VM for gaming, would I need a separate monitor, mouse and keyboard (both connected directly to the server via passed through devices)?
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