I can't get a Windows VM to post/boot in SCALE

[emsicz]

So I've tried installing SCALE and running a VM on it.

#1: SCALE has trouble booting and takes between 30 minutes and 10 hours to boot.
#2: Configuring a VM and pointing the OS disk to encrypted and locked dataset will break TrueNAS (can't launch, edit or remove the VM).
#3: Can't boot the VM even if everything else seems fine (this post).

So I was able to configure the VM with 4 cores, CPU Mode passthrough (don't know what it means, has no tooltip, can't find anything about it online), 16G RAM, GPU passthrough, installed Windows 10 on it and went to bed because rebooting the TrueNAS doesn't work (see #1 above). This morning I came to find the SCALE booted up, but failed to auto-start the VM (because the OS disk points to dataset that is encrypted and locked). I realized there's no point to have it auto-start, so I clicked the switch in the Virtualization UI to disable the auto-start. I was presented with error saying that TrueNAS failed to mount the installation media into the CD-ROM device (because the dataset with the media is also locked). I don't know how disabling auto-start is relevant with mounted media, but oh well. So I unlocked all datasets and came back to Virtualization UI. Now I can't start the VM. The UI will run the VM, the VNC works but it just shows black screen and the VM never posts/boots.

What can I do here?

 

[indivision]

If the install ever takes 10 hours to boot I would suggest that something is seriously wrong. So, until that gets resolved in some way, you just can't really know how that is impacting VM behavior etc.

Is the problem really identical to the link? You have the same hardware? It hangs while creating ramdisk?

 

[emsicz]

Is the problem really identical to the link? You have the same hardware? It hangs while creating ramdisk?

Yes, as far as I can tell. I don't know how to make the output more verbose or extract the logs once it does boot. But on L1Techs forum I was asked how does it behave in other systems and so I tried to make Server 2022 stick and another Scale stick and tried booting those. If I choose to boot from Windows stick, it will get stuck with "launching NTFS EFI loader 'efi\boot\bootx64". Booting from a SCALE install stick, it gets stuck with just "Welcome to GRUB!"

So either I got myself a faulty Kingston USB stick, or the SATA DOM disk isn't working right. I've never used a SATA DOM before, but it being SuperMicro I kinda trust it.

 

[emsicz]

So I've tried several other USB sticks and came out with same result. So instead, I removed the SM SATA DOM from the board and instead put Samsungs NVMe 970 EVO into the NVMe slot. Finally, the setups are moving now. So I'm thinking either the SM SATA DOM is faulty, or it got corrupted. I need to do some reading on how to diagnose those.

 

[indivision]

So I've tried several other USB sticks and came out with same result. So instead, I removed the SM SATA DOM from the board and instead put Samsungs NVMe 970 EVO into the NVMe slot. Finally, the setups are moving now. So I'm thinking either the SM SATA DOM is faulty, or it got corrupted. I need to do some reading on how to diagnose those.

The end symptom sounds the same (slow boot). But, the link for #1 issue describes much different hardware and error than you have.

Did you go through the manual to find info on using the SM SATA DOM? There could be some config options needed there. Not sure myself. I've had a number of Supermicro boards now. But, never used a SATA DOM.