FreeNAS + VirtualBox + Windows 7 = Unstable?

[Scharbag]

Hmm. I have a single processor VM, a dual and a quad. Never tried one with 3... But I admit that I really do not punish them with much.

Hope it gets stable for ya!!

 

[Jailer]

I gave up trying to get 7 to work without crashing. Actually I've not had good luck with many OS installs running save for XP x64. That has been rock solid.

I just installed Ubuntu server with phpbb3 to play around with the software and so far that is working well.

 

[1.21gigawatts]

Hmm. I have a single processor VM, a dual and a quad. Never tried one with 3... But I admit that I really do not punish them with much.

Hope it gets stable for ya!!

May I ask what other settings you're using? - chipset, APIC. PAE, etc? This just doesn't seem to want to be stable with anything other than a single core, which I MIGHT be able to live with.

 

[Whattteva]

Does you mouse cursor work ok? I can't get the mouse cursor to track properly and it's pretty much unusable because of it.

I'm going to take a guess that you're using VNC? I have the same problem until I scratched VNC and used RDP instead.
It appears RDP is just much more efficient. I got not only mouse cursor issues resolved, but also lag issues resolved(my connection only has 1 Mbps upstream).

 

[Philip Robar]

FreeNAS/(php)VirtualBox/Windows 8.1 success story:

I used VMware's vCenter Converter Standalone to virtualize my running 64 bit Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center machine. Moved the VMDK over to my Lenovo Thinkserver 140 (Core i3, 12GB) FreeNAS 9.3 server and was amazed when it just worked. I started with 1 CPU, 2 GB RAM, a SATA controller and Host I/O caching turned off (because I had forgotten about this thread). I've since bumped the memory up to 3GB and turned Host I/O caching on. (I also turned on PAE/NX which was off by default, because, "Why not?")

The cursor was seriously screwed up when using VNC clients until I installed the Guest Additions, but after that it worked correctly. (I've since switched to using the OS X version of Microsoft's RDP client. Thanks to Whatteva for reminding me of that option.)

I haven't stressed it yet, but so far so good.

To do:

1. Make sure that cable TV recordings via my SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime are still working.
2. Switch from a SATA controller to an LSI/SAS controller as that seems to be the prefered choice. (WMware recommends it.)
3. Verify that auto-starting of VirtualBox is working. Thanks to zufallsheld for the guide on how to do this.
4. Move my ATI graphics card from the my now hopefully ex-HTPC to the server and see if I can get accelerated transcoding via MCEBuddy working since FreeBSD can't be bothered to support the now two year old Intel Haswell graphics.
5. See if I can get VirtualBox/Windows to use the monitor (which would eventually be my TV) attached to my server. Is this possible?

Just for the heck of it, Geekbench numbers for the VM:
Geekbench 2: 4470 Single-Core
Geekbench 3: 2752 Single-Core

 

[Philip Robar]

Update: I couldn't get Windows Media Center to see the networked tuners in the converted-from-hardware VM and any fixes I found on the net only seemed to make things worse so I fresh installed a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. (Also, though it was otherwise stable, it was pretty pokey which gave me additional incentive to go with a fresh install.) So far it's working great. After I'm sure that recordings are happening reliably (which they seem to be so far) I'll turn off the Windows 8.1 Pro HTPC and upgrade the VM with that license.

As to my to do list:
I decided to not try the LSI controller since I don't need it's capabilities on this machine.
I also decided not to install a FreeBSD supported graphics card since neither QuickSync nor OpenCL hardware features are exposed by VirtualBox to Windows so there's no way to get hardware assisted transcoding.
Instead of looking for a way to get virtualized Windows talking to the TV I've decided to convert completely to PLEX and a Roku for media playback. (I use MCEBuddy to rename, remux, and transcode the WMC recordings to a PLEX/Roku friendly format. --Recommended)

In addition to replacing my current HTPC I've found the performance of the Windows VM to be more than good enough for casual use when I need a Windows box—even when doing recordings and video conversions. (I use a MAC as my primary PC.)

 

[hansmuff]

I can only get Win7 x64 stable when running 1 CPU.
No other setting has made a difference. I could crash the VM every time very easily by moving around windows on the Windows desktop. And I mean, all I had to do is install Win7 x64 SP1, then once the desktop shows, bring up task manager and move that around with the mouse. Crashed the VM every time.

With just 1 CPU, that isn't happening. I suppose I can 'live' with it, but 1 CPU even on a nice Xeon is quite slow.

The machine is a Xeon 1231v3 on a x10sl7-f, 32GB ecc, FreeNAS 9.3 with unmodified VirtualBox jail.

 

[ShimadaRiku]

I'm going to take a guess that you're using VNC? I have the same problem until I scratched VNC and used RDP instead.
It appears RDP is just much more efficient. I got not only mouse cursor issues resolved, but also lag issues resolved(my connection only has 1 Mbps upstream).

Mouse issue drove me nuts while trying to install VM.

The fix: you're suppose to manually download & install virtualbox guest additions in your VM.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

It appears RDP is just much more efficient.

Yes, RDP works as a virtual display device, while VNC scans the frame-buffer for changes.

 

[Scharbag]

Yup, the good ole guest additions does help VNC!

 

[decoy5657]

Ok, I am happy to update that I've found a way around the problem - at least I hope, running for a month now without any trouble or errors. For some reason, the Virtualbox does not like to have host IO caching disabled on my machine (and it's sadly the default). After enabling the Host IO caching for each drive, I seem to be running without trouble even during scrubs!

I've written a bit about the issue on my blog: http://petr.io/2014/12/25/virtualbox-freenas-maybe/

Where is this setting? I am running 9.10

 

[ShimadaRiku]

Where is this setting? I am running 9.10

phpVirtualBox > VM settings > Storage > SATA controller > Host I/O cache

I'm still on 9.3 not sure if it is any different in 9.10

 

[decoy5657]

Gotcha! I was looking around in FreeNAS itself. Thanks!

 

[decoy5657]

Ha. Seems to have solved my problem. I was having crash issues when creating snapshots. Will report back in a few weeks!

 

[RoadHazard]

Resurrecting this thread...

I've had Windows 7 (32-bit) running reliably within VirtualBox for years, but only in single-CPU mode. If I bump the CPU count up to 2 or more, Windows crashes almost immediately. Is there a known fix for this, or am I doomed to spend days tweaking all the VBox options one by one, hoping to stumble on a configuration that might work?

Here's how it's set up currently:

4096 MB base RAM
Chipset: ICH9
Enable IO APIC = yes
Enable EFI = no
Hardware clock in UTC = no
Processors: 1 (out of 8)
Enable PAE/NX = yes
Enable VT-x/AMD-V = yes
Enable Nested Paging = yes
I assume the other options for display, storage, network, etc aren't relevant but I'm happy to detail them if anyone wants to know.

 

[1.21gigawatts]

What I'm hoping for is that the new freenas will solve this.

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