I apologize if these questions have been asked and answered, but I've searched high and low and could not find the any answers. So here goes.
I have a newish FreeNAS-11.3-U2.1 system which I built in April. It has an ASUS PC11-C/M server motherboard, Intel Xeon E-2236 processor (6 cores, hyper threaded), 2 x 16GB ECC memory and 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in a RAIDZ2 pool. I am using this system primarily as a file server.
But after running it for a while, I can see that for the most part it just sits idle and that is a waste. So I thought I would use it to run a couple of virtual machines. I have created both Linux and Windows 10 virtual machine and they both seem work fine. However ...
Neither machine would show anything other than a dual cpu configuration even thought when creating the VM I gave both 4 CPUs. So I did a little investigating and discover two "tuneables"; hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package and hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core. So my first question is what is the proper way of applying these tunables. I added them to System -> Tunables and that is not the issue. But as my CPU has 6 cores and it supports hyper threading, do I use those numbers as the values to enter? Do I set hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package to 6 and then set hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core to 2. Or do I just set some arbitrary numbers that I would like to see. I did set both tunables to the 6 and 2 numbers and now my VM's can both see 4 cores. I also increased the number of cores on the Window VM to 6 and it does see 6 CPUs. I think that is the correct way to apply them, but just not sure.
Also, I've set the tunables type field to Loader, but am not sure if I should have used Loader, rc.conf or sysctl. The way I read the docs is that using Loader will set the tunables boot time and sysctl is kind of like dynamic loading when needed. Not too sure of the rc.conf setting.
Next, however is much more puzzling. On my Windows VM when I bring up the task manager, I never see any network activity; it is always zero in and out. Why is this? In addition, the Windows VM cannot see the file shares on the server. I have a backup configured exactly the same, and the Windows VM can see the shares on this server without issue. It can also see the shares on my local workstation, but nothing on the server on which the VM is running.
Lastly, when start up the Linux VM I cannot get it to use a screen resolution of anything other thant 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Is there some special driver that needs to be loaded in Linux to get higher resolutions? By the way, my Linux VM is using Mint Mate 19.3. By the way, my network under Linux shows data being sent and received, but not under Windows 10.
Thanks for any and all help.
Greg ...
I have a newish FreeNAS-11.3-U2.1 system which I built in April. It has an ASUS PC11-C/M server motherboard, Intel Xeon E-2236 processor (6 cores, hyper threaded), 2 x 16GB ECC memory and 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in a RAIDZ2 pool. I am using this system primarily as a file server.
But after running it for a while, I can see that for the most part it just sits idle and that is a waste. So I thought I would use it to run a couple of virtual machines. I have created both Linux and Windows 10 virtual machine and they both seem work fine. However ...
Neither machine would show anything other than a dual cpu configuration even thought when creating the VM I gave both 4 CPUs. So I did a little investigating and discover two "tuneables"; hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package and hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core. So my first question is what is the proper way of applying these tunables. I added them to System -> Tunables and that is not the issue. But as my CPU has 6 cores and it supports hyper threading, do I use those numbers as the values to enter? Do I set hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package to 6 and then set hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core to 2. Or do I just set some arbitrary numbers that I would like to see. I did set both tunables to the 6 and 2 numbers and now my VM's can both see 4 cores. I also increased the number of cores on the Window VM to 6 and it does see 6 CPUs. I think that is the correct way to apply them, but just not sure.
Also, I've set the tunables type field to Loader, but am not sure if I should have used Loader, rc.conf or sysctl. The way I read the docs is that using Loader will set the tunables boot time and sysctl is kind of like dynamic loading when needed. Not too sure of the rc.conf setting.
Next, however is much more puzzling. On my Windows VM when I bring up the task manager, I never see any network activity; it is always zero in and out. Why is this? In addition, the Windows VM cannot see the file shares on the server. I have a backup configured exactly the same, and the Windows VM can see the shares on this server without issue. It can also see the shares on my local workstation, but nothing on the server on which the VM is running.
Lastly, when start up the Linux VM I cannot get it to use a screen resolution of anything other thant 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Is there some special driver that needs to be loaded in Linux to get higher resolutions? By the way, my Linux VM is using Mint Mate 19.3. By the way, my network under Linux shows data being sent and received, but not under Windows 10.
Thanks for any and all help.
Greg ...