SOLVED VMs Losing Network Connectivity

madmac

Cadet
Joined
Jan 28, 2012
Messages
6
I built a new system and installed FreeNAS on it. All has gone well.

I created 2 Windows Server 2016 VMs (sorry - testing a work thing) and they installed and run fine. For a bit.

And then they freeze or lose their network connectivity. RDP (after I enabled it) can't connect. VNC gets me the console, but it's non-responsive (send the CtrlAltDel and nothing). Or just a black box . . .

Everything works fine for 10 minutes to an hour. And when I come back to it, pfffft . . . .

Any thoughts?

Doug
madmac63@gmail.com
 

kdragon75

Wizard
Joined
Aug 7, 2016
Messages
2,457
My first suspect without more information is low memory. Check your memory when it locks up. I have read about cases where a bhyve instance configured for 3GB of RAM will use upward of 5GB and people claimed this was normal. FreeNAS with ZFS needs lots of RAM, FreeNAS with ZFS and Windows VMs needs more RAM than you can shake a DIMM at.
 

scrappy

Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2017
Messages
347
As per forum rules can you please list your system's specs?
 

madmac

Cadet
Joined
Jan 28, 2012
Messages
6
KDragon75 & Scrappy - thanks for your notes. I think I have it worked out.

My System:
FreeNAS-11.1-RELEASE
SuperMicro MB - Mini-ITX 2133/1866/1600MHz ECC DDR4 Single socket FCBGA 1667 Motherboard (X10SDV-TLN4F-O)
It's got a 4 Core Xeon CPU and 64 GB of RAM
2 1 gbps Ethernet NICs
2 10 gbps Ethernet NICs

I've got 6 Seagate Barracuda Pro 10 TB Drives - all in one big ZVol
SANDisk 16 GB USB Key for Boot/OS

This may be overkill for a NAS, but I wanted to host some service machines in VMs.
It's based on the DIY NAS posted by Brian Moses:
https://blog.brianmoses.net/2017/03/diy-nas-2017-edition.html

Currently, I have 2 VMs:
AD1 - Windows Server 2016 AD Controller/DHCP/DNS
CS1 - Windows Server 2016 - to run a Commvault CommServe

Each VM has been allocated 2 Cores and 16 GB of RAM

The issue appears to be the NIC Drivers. The Intel Drivers bhyve/FreeNAS provides didn't like the NIC Ports on the SuperMicro.

So, I changed them over to VirtIO in the FreeNAS/bhyve management interface.
This caused my Windows Server Systems to have no connectivity, as expected, but VNC is our friend.
I downloaded the VirtIO drivers (from github, I believe) and then used the Windows Server Computer Manager - Device Manager to load the drivers.

In Device Manager, the VirtIO "NICs" were tagged as "unknown Ethernet Device" so I right-clicked it, said Browse for Driver, pointed it to the mounted/exploded ISO for the VirtIO drivers, and voila, they installed fine. Rebooted, and all has been fine since . . .

Thanks for your offers to help.

Doug
 

scrappy

Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2017
Messages
347
Glad to hear you got it sorted out.
 

madmac

Cadet
Joined
Jan 28, 2012
Messages
6
Scrappy, thanks for the kind words.

Question: Will this thread get indexed so that Google/Bing/Whatever searches will turn it up? And did I do a good enough job of explaining the issue and the fix? I don't mind "paying back" for all the help I've received over the years . . .

Thanks

Doug
 
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