Virtualbox plugin Windows 7 client 'Aborted' problem

[csjjpm]

Hi,
would any of you kinds folks be able to help me determine why a Windows 7 client keeps aborting. I reduced the amount of RAM and CPU assigned but after no particular length of time the client aborts.
I've installed a new one and the same thing happened.
My FreeNAS server has a i7 and 16GB RAM and is running one other custom JAIL so I don't think it is a resource issue. Even when I have the other JAIL offline and I have freshly rebooted the FreeNAS server the client on the Virtualbox plugin aborts.
I'm relatively new to FreeNAS and BSD so I am not sure how to capture logs and analyse them. Any pointers would be good.
Thanks
Paul

 

[Jailer]

Good luck with that. I've tried several times and have never been able to get it to run for any length of time without generating errors in the console and/or crashing.

 

[csjjpm]

It is odd. I had it working fine and online for ages, then I installed my custom JAIL and the Virtualbox plugin started playing up.

 

[csjjpm]

So I found the reference to PETR and ticked Host IO and it has been stable for a while now. Much longer than before.

 

[joeschmuck]

So the issue is not Virtual box running but more getting Windoze to run in Virtual Box in a jail on FreeNAS.

Been there and fail as well, and failed on Ubuntu. My conclusion is the Virtual Box implementation is very poorly implemented and really not suitable for the FreeNAS environment. All the functions are not implemented and keep in mind that this is not a full blown installation of FreeBSD you are running on.

In the future with FreeNAS 10 we are hoping the new jail/virtual machine system will be more robust.

To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that a virtual machine was added to a NAS application.

To the OP, of course you realize you are not running on a system for which we would recommend for a FreeNAS system.

 

[csjjpm]

Since setting the HOST IO the FreeNAS memory usage has 'reporting' is now around 50% of total. Before setting this it was almost maxing out at 100%.

Thanks everyone for their feedback. I have the odd Xeon or two knocking around at work but I wanted a small quiet chassis to sit in my attic out of the way so the i7 will have to do ;-)

 

[csjjpm]

I has now been running 12 hours without an issue. Fingers crossed.

 

[joeschmuck]

What exactly did you do to make it work and how well is it working? How much RAM is allocated to the Windows emulation? I'd like to try it out.

 

[csjjpm]

Hi Joe,
sorry I havent been on the FreeNAS forum since last week. If you google 'petr freenas virtualbox host io' and read his page there is a bit that says in phpVirtualbox click on 'Settings' for your client, then under 'Storage' tick the 'Use host I/O cache' for the 'Controller: SATA'. This made it stable and I havent rebooted it yet since I did this. Obviously your client has to be offline to make changes to the storage settings.
I assigned 2GB RAM and 1 CPU/Core and it is quite fast and stable. I am using Windows 7 64bit. I used to have a ESX vSphere system with a Windows 7 client and I had to give it 4GB and 2 core to make it useable. This is much better.
Paul

 

[joeschmuck]

Paul,
Thanks for the feedback. I'll do my Google search and read up on it and then give it a try. I hope it works as well on my system as it does on yours.

-Joe

 

[csjjpm]

Obviously it depends on your system spec. I've an i7 860 with 16GB and was already flamed as this isn't an appropriate spec for FreeNAS but it works fine for me. Super fast and I am running everything I want. It is much better than my old VSphere and attached NAS setup.

 

[danb35]

At first glance, this seems to have made a big difference. Previously, the Win7 VM aborted during attempted installation pretty repeatably. With the host I/O cache box checked, I've been able to install successfully. Thanks for the tip! It'll still call for a bit of testing to make sure it's stable, but it's already better than it was.