DISCLAIMER: I posted this thread on the virtual box forums and basically got told to take a hike. So I hope its ok that I'm putting it here. I've made comments about this before but now I have a bit more info.
Hi,
I'm new to virtual box, and this is my first post!
Here is the background:
I'm running freenas, the latest beta 9.2.1.6 on both an HP n40L and a new build xeon E3 1220 V3 with a super micro X10SL7-F mobo, 16gb ECC ram. Freenas now comes with a virtual box template version 4.3.10_OSE which I have been experimenting with. My goal is to run windows 7 as a VM with iTunes to serve music to a bunch of airport expresses that i have in the house. My n40L works flawlessly, in this set up and I had windows running absolutely fine as a VM in a virtual box jail and playing music. The problem is that 1) this machine is very slow, it works but it is slow 2) it is a test-bed system so I don't want to depend on it... For this reasons I want to run my VMs on my new xeon machine!
The problem...
Windows 7 as a VM in Virtualbox seems to be highly unstable, especially when doing anything with iTunes. Basically at some point, often/always when using iTunes the Windows guest crashes... sometimes this goes to an aborted state in virtual box GUI but not always. If i try ACPI shutdown or Reset then the machines starts to shutdown but the progress indicator gets stuck at 28% in the virtual box GUI. At this point my only options are to disable the virtual box jail and re-enable it in the freenas GUI. The slightly worrying thing is that at any point - after windows has hung my entire freenas machine can just reboot! most often it occurs when disabling the jail. Someone has said that this could be due to an incomplete shutdown of a VIMAGE stack!
Looking through my vbox-logs.... all 3 have this error that causes an aborted machine....
08:40:37.934868 AIOMgr: I/O manager 0x00000808ff9920 encountered a critical error (rc=VERR_FILE_AIO_NO_REQUEST) during operation. Falling back to failsafe mode. Expect reduced performance
08:40:37.935169 AIOMgr: Error happened in /wrkdirs/usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose/work/VirtualBox-4.3.10/src/VBox/VMM/VMMR3/PDMAsyncCompletionFileNormal.cpp:(1664){int pdmacFileAioMgrNormal(RTTHREADINT*, void*)}
08:40:37.935181 AIOMgr: Please contact the product vendor
08:41:38.191679 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 3
08:41:38.191957 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 6
08:41:38.191964 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 8
08:41:38.191980 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 10
08:41:38.191986 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 11 etc etc etc......
I have tried the following things and nothing seems to work.
1) new windows installs - i've tried about 6 including 32bit and 64bit
2) enabling and disabling... ALL hardware virtualisation, including VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging, Large Pages, VT-x unrestricted execution and VT-x VPID (Intel only)
new install of freenas
3) The vdi file location: 1) on SSD formatted to ZFS and mounted in the jail 2) within the jail itself which is on a ZFS pool consisting of a SSD mirror.. on my n40L the jails were located on a single spinning disk formatted with ZFS.
As I'm trying to get windows to run iTunes... that has been my main objective so I'm not sure how often windows does/would/will crash if I'm not just using iTunes... as it is quite an important server and i've not tried installing word. My Virtualbox is also running pfsense also using VIMAGE stack and seems to be stable and working without problems.
Is anyone able to shed some light on this?
Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Andrew
Hi,
I'm new to virtual box, and this is my first post!
Here is the background:
I'm running freenas, the latest beta 9.2.1.6 on both an HP n40L and a new build xeon E3 1220 V3 with a super micro X10SL7-F mobo, 16gb ECC ram. Freenas now comes with a virtual box template version 4.3.10_OSE which I have been experimenting with. My goal is to run windows 7 as a VM with iTunes to serve music to a bunch of airport expresses that i have in the house. My n40L works flawlessly, in this set up and I had windows running absolutely fine as a VM in a virtual box jail and playing music. The problem is that 1) this machine is very slow, it works but it is slow 2) it is a test-bed system so I don't want to depend on it... For this reasons I want to run my VMs on my new xeon machine!
The problem...
Windows 7 as a VM in Virtualbox seems to be highly unstable, especially when doing anything with iTunes. Basically at some point, often/always when using iTunes the Windows guest crashes... sometimes this goes to an aborted state in virtual box GUI but not always. If i try ACPI shutdown or Reset then the machines starts to shutdown but the progress indicator gets stuck at 28% in the virtual box GUI. At this point my only options are to disable the virtual box jail and re-enable it in the freenas GUI. The slightly worrying thing is that at any point - after windows has hung my entire freenas machine can just reboot! most often it occurs when disabling the jail. Someone has said that this could be due to an incomplete shutdown of a VIMAGE stack!
Looking through my vbox-logs.... all 3 have this error that causes an aborted machine....
08:40:37.934868 AIOMgr: I/O manager 0x00000808ff9920 encountered a critical error (rc=VERR_FILE_AIO_NO_REQUEST) during operation. Falling back to failsafe mode. Expect reduced performance
08:40:37.935169 AIOMgr: Error happened in /wrkdirs/usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose/work/VirtualBox-4.3.10/src/VBox/VMM/VMMR3/PDMAsyncCompletionFileNormal.cpp:(1664){int pdmacFileAioMgrNormal(RTTHREADINT*, void*)}
08:40:37.935181 AIOMgr: Please contact the product vendor
08:41:38.191679 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 3
08:41:38.191957 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 6
08:41:38.191964 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 8
08:41:38.191980 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 10
08:41:38.191986 AHCI#0P0: Cancelled task 11 etc etc etc......
I have tried the following things and nothing seems to work.
1) new windows installs - i've tried about 6 including 32bit and 64bit
2) enabling and disabling... ALL hardware virtualisation, including VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging, Large Pages, VT-x unrestricted execution and VT-x VPID (Intel only)
new install of freenas
3) The vdi file location: 1) on SSD formatted to ZFS and mounted in the jail 2) within the jail itself which is on a ZFS pool consisting of a SSD mirror.. on my n40L the jails were located on a single spinning disk formatted with ZFS.
As I'm trying to get windows to run iTunes... that has been my main objective so I'm not sure how often windows does/would/will crash if I'm not just using iTunes... as it is quite an important server and i've not tried installing word. My Virtualbox is also running pfsense also using VIMAGE stack and seems to be stable and working without problems.
Is anyone able to shed some light on this?
Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Andrew