Big thank you and beware....

Constantin

Vampire Pig
Joined
May 19, 2017
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1,828
First of all, a huge thank you to @Yorick for his excellent tutorial on how to install a windows 10 virtual machine on a FreeNAS server. Thanks to his easy-to-follow instructions, I had all that done in relatively little time. Also, a huge thanks to the iXSystems team for making it so simple to attach ISOs, set up a virtual machine, etc.

BlueIris is now running just fine and I agree that it’s in many ways superior to ZoneMinder though after all the spend to get here, my head is spinning somewhat. However, I counsel anyone following my footsteps to not activate windows 10 pro until they have settled on how many cores they need to get acceptable performance out of blueiris. This is especially acute on low clock speed systems like mine (D-1537). I found that I realistically needed to allocate 8 threads to the VM.

The stock allocation of cores to windows 10 (2 cores) is not suitable for intensive work. For anything beyond 2 cores / threads, you have to add two tuneables as mentioned by @blanchet as described here. The allocation of cores to a VM without the use of the tuneables does not seem to work as expected in FreeNAS 11.3 - i.e. you can set 8 cores in the VM control panel yet Windows only sees two unless you change the tuneables.

I do find the use of "virtual CPUs" to be a bit less than self-explanatory. Is it a thread or a core? etc. I wish that the ? marker in the GUI was a bit clearer and explained that "Virtual CPUs per VM = threads (i.e. # of cores x # of threads per core)".

Only then activate, once you know the system can handle the stress as subsequent changes to the processor core count allocated to the VM can make your activation break. the troubleshooter didn’t work, support was cheerfully useless, etc. The only workaround I eventually found was setting up my windows 10 login to use the MS global sign in (vs. a local one).
 
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Yorick

Wizard
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Nov 4, 2018
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Good to know. Are those tunables needed in TrueNAS Core? It seems to me you can just specify number of cores (and whether to use threads). That does answer though how that used to work in FreeNAS, which I was wondering about.

Licensing caveats received, that’s a doozy of a gotcha.
 

Constantin

Vampire Pig
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May 19, 2017
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The whole activation and phone-home business by MS Windows 10 Pro gets pretty tiresome. I had it running, activated, etc. and then discovered that BlueIris was maxing out the CPU 100% consistently, resulting in dropped frames and so on. Once I changed the core count successfully with tuneables, the windows activation watermark came up. I tried using the activation troubleshooter to no avail, then tried tech support via chat.

Chat bounced me around multiple MS divisions and the last one (before my session was abruptly ended) was supposed to be Windows commercial as running Windows 10 on a VM apparently cannot be resolved by the "Windows home" team. I also discovered that multiple machines that should show up in my online microsoft user profile / account do not - presumably because you have to login into them using the global MS login vs. using a local one, even if the registrant email matches across all machines. Even then, my VM instance does not show up on the MS list.

So, as far as I am concerned, MS Windows activation is a hot mess. Just when I start to think that Windows has a lot going for it, they throw in this kind of an experience to remind me why I'm still a Mac user. That said, once I started using the MS global login consistently, changes to virtual CPU counts did trigger the activation watermark but the troubleshooter was able to mitigate them. Bottom line, they really want you to use the MS global login, I guess. Given the intended use of this VM, I likely will place it and the cameras behind a firewall that blocks all access to the internet. The only allegedly internet content they will have access to is the local NTP server (via a redirect).

Next step is installing a SSD for BlueIris data to make scrubbing and replay more fluid. Given that it's rated for multiple DWPD and will be experiencing a DW every month or two, it ought to be OK. Overall, I am very pleased with the VM, BlueIris, etc. as this will allow me to avoid the need for a NVR box (with its very limited functionalities) and give my excess CPU cores something to do (yay!). So thank you again @Yorick and @blanchet, the light of your torches allowed this neophyte successfully navigate the dungeons of VM successfully.
 
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Yorick

Wizard
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Nov 4, 2018
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While it doesn’t fit the letter perfectly, the spirit of the license is intact:

“Windows 10 can be purchased via Retail (FPP) to run in a VM locally on the device. Windows 10 FPP licenses can be used in type 2 hypervisor scenarios (i.e. client Hyper-V, Boot Camp, Parallels, etc.) on the device. Only the primary user may remotely access Windows running locally on the device, and FPP licensing does not provide the license rights to access Windows remotely from a server.”

What that’s about is “you can’t use a retail license to run a Win10 vm and then have various users use it, but you can have a Win10 for a single user, virtualized”. Sure, “locally on the device” vs “on my FreeNAS”, but this is meant to stop mass use of retail licenses for VDI or similar, not stop a single user from deploying a Win10 vm for their individual use.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
While it doesn’t fit the letter perfectly, the spirit of the license is intact:

“Windows 10 can be purchased via Retail (FPP) to run in a VM locally on the device. Windows 10 FPP licenses can be used in type 2 hypervisor scenarios (i.e. client Hyper-V, Boot Camp, Parallels, etc.) on the device. Only the primary user may remotely access Windows running locally on the device, and FPP licensing does not provide the license rights to access Windows remotely from a server.”

What that’s about is “you can’t use a retail license to run a Win10 vm and then have various users use it, but you can have a Win10 for a single user, virtualized”. Sure, “locally on the device” vs “on my FreeNAS”, but this is meant to stop mass use of retail licenses for VDI or similar, not stop a single user from deploying a Win10 vm for their individual use.

No. What it means is that you could run Windows under VMware Fusion on a Mac (locally) or Windows under VMware Workstation on a Windows host (locally) where you are sitting in front of the machine it is running on, because you are not licensed to access Windows Home or Pro remotely from a server (which FreeNAS clearly is), even if you are the primary user. The primary user *is* allowed to remotely access Windows running locally on something like Fusion or Workstation when the host it is running on is not a server.

It is very much a violation of both the spirit and letter of the license to run Windows Home or Pro as a VM on a server and access it remotely.

This got very messy for a few years because Microsoft was getting very uptight and wanted things like Windows Nano Server to "win the data center" away from Linux and some of their licensing was changed to become even more Kafkaesque.

So you could probably run Windows on your NAS as a VM if you managed to pass thru a video card and keyboard to it, but even there you are not allowed to access that "remotely" because the NAS clearly qualifies as a server.
 

Constantin

Vampire Pig
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May 19, 2017
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Wow. Well, I hope that the Microsoft goons can overlook my little, paid-for, installation. FWIW, I was completely open with support about running this copy on a VM in a home server and none of them told me I was in violation of the EULA. Morevover, I expect no support, and having tried support, am happy never to try it again. The server is in my home, this copy of Win 10 is only for my own personal use, and I only access it while at home, so that's a bit different from a commercial setting, i.e. hosting a bunch of Win10 VMs for hundreds of users inside a server farm.

Win10 Pro also explicitly offers remote desktop, which is why I sprung for the $$$ Pro license over the less expensive home version. Seems weird to offer this feature yet be uptight about where / how it is used, especially when a single user pays $200 for the privilege of installing a licensed copy downloaded from MS. Volume pricing even for server farms will never be that good. I reckon what MS really wants to avoid is having folk re-use licenses that were issued alongside hardware at throwaway prices vs. users paying rack rate pricing for a retail copy.
 
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