Windows VM freezing

[dorifutoboi]

Hi guys, I am new to FreeNAS and have been running 11.1-U5 for a couple of weeks now. My motherboard is an ASRock EP2C602 with 2x Xeon E5-2680 and 128GB PC3-14900 ECC memory installed.

I have installed a Windows 10 VM giving it all 16 virtual CPUs and 8GB of memory. I have a few MKV files that I am trying to remux with MKVToolNix GUI but I cannot get any jobs to complete without the VM locking up. In the Windows 10 VM task manager, the CPU usage is around 100% and the memory usage is around 2GB however in the FreeNAS web GUI, the CPU usage is around 15%.

Do you guys have any ideas on what I can do to try and diagnose this problem ? I am not very good with computers so I am at a loss on where to start. MKVToolNix GUI on Windows 10 on my laptop remuxes my videos without locking up but I want to do it in the VM as the server is more powerful than my laptop and will take much less time.

I appreciate everyone's time,
David

 

[dorifutoboi]

Apparently in the FreeNAS web GUI, Reporting -> CPU -> CPU Usage graph reports number of jiffies instead of %CPU usage by default. I enabled System -> Advanced -> Report CPU usage in percentage and ran MKVToolNix GUI again. Again the Windows 10 VM task manager showed the CPU usage to be around 100% while the FreeNAS web GUI CPU Usage graph reports around 15%.

I have been using the e1000 NIC for my VM but tried using the VirtIO NIC instead. The previous MKVToolNix GUI job that kept failing succeeded. I will try a few more jobs before I consider this solved.

I felt a bit hopeless since nobody replied because I thought that I would never get the Windows 10 VM running to a state that I wanted it to be at. I really hope that this simple thing is the fix to my problem.

 

[chris crude]

For what it's worth, when VMs were new to FreeNAS many people including myself had the same issues. Changing nic to VirtIO fixes it. It's been nearly a year now and I have had no issues, aside from windows updates shutting the VM down at unexpected times.

 

[dorifutoboi]

For what it's worth, when VMs were new to FreeNAS many people including myself had the same issues. Changing nic to VirtIO fixes it. It's been nearly a year now and I have had no issues, aside from windows updates shutting the VM down at unexpected times.

Hi Chris, thanks for your reply. I am glad to hear that your VM has been working well for you for almost a year now. I hope mine will be trouble free as well and I look forward to using it.

 

[apestabrook1]

Im using the VirtIO ethernet adapter and my CPU is still at 99% utilization all the time.
Any other suggestions?

 

[chris crude]

Im using the VirtIO ethernet adapter and my CPU is still at 99% utilization all the time.
Any other suggestions?

Do you only have FreeNAS setup with VirtIO, or do you have the driver installed in your Windows VM also? You need both.