VM is unstable with windows guest?

[Sander Jansen]

Hey,

Is anyone trying to install windows 7/10 in a VM? for windows 7 i cant even install, it just hangs on the language select screen.
For windows 10, it somewhat installes. sometimes it hangs and i need to restart the whole thing (including freenas) to continue...

After i got windows 10 installed its so unstable that half of the time i cant even boot it.

Is it just windows and is linux more stable? what can i do to get windows running at least more stable?

EDIT:
I also seem to not be able to change processor count. i have a 8-core cpu and the VM always gets 2 cores, not more, not less...
and also its not possible to reconnect VNC if you close the session for a bit. once this happens, its a full reboot of the system to be able to do something about it...

it seems that this is not quiet stable at all... so i wonder why its in a stable version of freenas

 

[adrianwi]

What are you using to create the Windows VM in FreeNAS?

I had a Windows 7 and then 10 VM running using VirtualBox running for 90+ days with the only reboots required for Microsoft updates.

 

[Sander Jansen]

i used virtualbox aswell with great success... but in this new version of freenas (11) it uses bhyve/iohyve for virtualisation...

 

[Phil_02]

I am having similar issues. What I am seeing is when the Windows VM locks up or freezes I see bhyve in 'top' or in the gui 'Display System Processes' running close to 100% cpu. I can ssh to the box or open the shell and 'kill -9 #' where the # is the PID of the bhyve process. This saves me from reloading the whole box.

I have Centos 7 running without issues as of yet. Windows server 2012 and Windows 7 have continuously locked up after a couple minutes of run time.

Unfortunately I don't have a fix. I have been trying different bios settings on my Dell C2100 with no luck thus far.

 

[Sander Jansen]

@Phil_02 How is your box responding to running VMs when headless (when you have the VM running and close VNC)? in my case that also freezes things up... Im not able to start a VM without VNC open or when i close VNC im not able to log back in... it freezes as soon as i close the VNC connection...

I'm going to test CentOS7 then... it doesnt really matter what im running... i just need a media server and if possible a good sync tool to run

 

[Phil_02]

What vnc viewer are you using? If I used TightVNC or TigerVNC I was able to log back in until the VM freezes on its own (not VNC related). I was having issues getting UltraVNC to function correctly where the screen would no longer refresh and turn grey so I went back to the first two viewers I mentioned.

 

[Sander Jansen]

i was using just the normal VNC client ... but i sort of changed to screen connect as i have a license for that and then i can just connect with it without problems. This methode is not using the vnc functions at all but uses its own tool that i installed into the VM. so its problem solved for now... and i have to say, thanks for teh centos 7 tip. its rocksolid so far.

not trying to get a mediaserver installed... i was thinking of serviio in combination with wine (as its a windows only tool) but if that isnt working im sure i can find some random other mediaserver without much problem... a good syncing tool is something else... im using Allway Sync for windows right now... but i have not found a decent syncing tool that works over SSH to sync and can handle multiuple syncs on interval and handle about 15 TB data

 

[Phil_02]

Glad centos is working for you. I use Plex for my media server, Kodi is good too. I also use Nextcloud (previously called Owncloud) for my home syncing of documents and files across machines.

If you need to sync 15TB of data, look at rsync or if both boxes are running zfs use the zfs send/receive of snapshots.

 

[Sander Jansen]

for the sync, the other side is synology (sadly) so im limited in the options i have... rsync is supported but the logging in and stuff for the accounts is a mess to get cross platform for some reason... if someone knowes a good guide for that then please let me know...

i tryed plex but for some reason it really does not like anime and things with weird titles... creditd for the try and getting some random album art though :P

 

[Osiris]

After installation, add a VirtIO NIC and remove the other.
Search on this forum for unstable Windows vms and network drivers and you'll quickly find a solution

PS: sorry about necro'ing but this issue seems unanswered, while it actually is.

 

[yottabit]

Yep, and apart from replacing E1000 with VirtIO NIC as Osiris mentioned, there is a config file in FreeNAS you have to edit in order to get bhyve to show the guest OS multiple cores instead of multiple CPUs.

I have 32-thread Xeon, and I had the same issue where Windows would only show two CPUs because that's the (non-Server edition) Windows limitation. But they will allow something ridiculous like 128 cores/threads, so you just tell bhyve to present all of your host threads as cores to the guest OS.

The bhyve limit is 16 threads/cores per VM, so I was only able to assign 16 of my 32 to a single VM, but that's a lot better than 2. ;-)

Search the forums to find the config file.