Windows VM For Small Business?

empmdk

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I do all the IT work for a small business & will be building them a new server very soon. My plan has been to run FreeNAS for backups of all PC's in the office and other general file storage & have a Windows VM installed. Some of the software they use (accounting & estimates) requires a Windows based server to hold the files.
On my home server I have been testing this scenario & so far has been very stable. My only issue with it is that it seems to be fairly laggy even while using VirtIO drivers. However, they will not be using the Windows install directly. The software they use basically just works with the files stored on there so I don't think it would be a big deal.

The Windows VM will have it's own pool running on an SSD which will be backed up daily to the mass storage pool of Red drives.

Does anyone here have any experience with this kind of situation? Would you trust this setup for a small office, any tips, alternatives, etc.
 
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blanchet

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Apr 17, 2018
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Bhyve Windows VM are very slow because the virtio disk is not supported yet. It is probably a bad idea to use such a setup for a professional usage.
VMware is a better plateform to run Windows VM than bhyve.

With VMware ESXi free, you have to install an agent (for example Veeam Agent Free) to backup the VM.
Therefore, I strongly suggest to buy at least VMware vSphere Essentials, so that you can use Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition (it can backup 10 VMs for free) to backup VMs without agent. In this case you will have very good setup for a small office.

Other hypervisors (Citrix Xenserver, XCP-NG, Hyper-V, Promox VE) may work, but VMware ESXi is really the best product on the market.

If you have the suitable hardware and skills, you can setup a datacenter in a box with VMware and FreeNAS. But a setup with two servers is easier.
 

empmdk

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Thanks for the great information, blanchet. Since I don't have enough spare parts laying around to do a test build with ESXi or XCP, I'll stick with having two systems at least till FreeNAS has better Windows compatibility.
 

blanchet

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Good news: there is a patch to support virtio disk for Windows guests.
Bad news: the patch has reached the FreeBSD repository only on May 2, 2019, that means you may have to wait for FreeNAS 12.1 to get it.
 

empmdk

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Mar 19, 2017
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Ah great. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll keep an eye on the roadmap for this.
 

ChrisChros

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Hi, is this patch now included within 11.3 RC1?
If so, how can I change from AHCI to VirtIO Disk Driver on an existing Windows VM?
Thanks
 

Tsaukpaetra

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If you already have an install using AHCI, you'll need to get the VirtIO drivers installed and working in order to do the switch.
First, add a spare disk as VirtIO (Do NOT switch your OS drive yet at this point, it doesn't need to be formatted or anything, any ZVol will work). Once booted, mount the VirtIO driver ISO, go into Device Manager and find the Unknown Device, right-click and choose Update Driver.
In the New Hardware wizard, select "Browse my computer for driver software", and enter in the mounted drive's letter in for the search path (I.e. D:\). Click Next, and Windows should automatically find the RedHat VirtIO driver. It should prompt you to allow signed drivers (if you've never installed a VirtIO driver before).
At this point, if Windows has not crashed you should be able to shutdown the VM, go into Devices, and switch the OS drive to VirtIO (you can also remove the dummy disk, we're done with it now).
If all goes well, Windows will start up, say it's installing devices and reboot back, normal as can be (except perhaps a little faster now that it's using VirtIO).
 

ChrisChros

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Thanks, I followed your instruction with creating a spare disk and mounting this as VirtIO Disk. Windows installed a driver "Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller".
Is this the right one?
 

sretalla

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ChrisChros

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Thanks.
 

ChrisChros

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it works. Thanks a lot.

If all goes well, Windows will start up, say it's installing devices and reboot back, normal as can be (except perhaps a little faster now that it's using VirtIO).
"little faster" is my main target to do the change from AHCI to VirtIO. With the AHCI Windows performs really slow. Each and every "click" will bring the system load to 100%, even with 4 vCPUs and 8GB RAM.
 

Tsaukpaetra

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I would also recommend using remote desktop as the VNC device is also less than speedy.
 

ChrisChros

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Thats what I already do.
 

Tsaukpaetra

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Hmm, well, clicking things normally doesn't bring a system to 100%, that's not normal... But not really on topic for this thread.
 

ChrisChros

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thats truth, so from my point of view problem of changing from AHCI to VirtIO is solved.
The other topic I have to investigate and maybe come back later.
 

diskdiddler

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Chris, can you provide an update on how the system has been? is the performance acceptable?

What was the other problem, do you still have it?
Finally, where does one ACTUALLY FIND the most up to date, VirtIO driver?
 

ChrisChros

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Chris, can you provide an update on how the system has been? is the performance acceptable?
Changing from AHCI to VirtIO increased the speed but is still not as fast as I would expect with the specs my system is running.
 

diskdiddler

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diskdiddler

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Changing from AHCI to VirtIO increased the speed but is still not as fast as I would expect with the specs my system is running.

Mine isn't perfect but it's definitely usable - what about stability?
 
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