Setting up VM for remote workstation

[DavyV97]

I currently have an IBM server with a Intel® Xeon® CPU E7- 2870, 128 GB RAM  and some other hardware.

I want to use this for running multiple Windows 10 VM's as remote workstations, I still have to work some things out though.

 

I would like to know your opinions on remote accessing the VM's, I've heard good things about RDP from jonp but it doesn't seem to work smoothly for me. Especially when watching a video or something it really starts to stutter (I'm on a 1 Gbps LAN connection).

 

I currently have 2x 250GB SSD's installed for running the VM's on. Is this data also stored on the array (and thus protected by the parity disk)? Or should I always manually back it up?

Also, when installing the first VM I left the disk space at 30G (standard) thinking I could upgrade it later. Though I can't seem to find the option anymore.

 

I know most of these items have probably been discussed before and I've looked around at the forum but I haven't found an answer really.

 

Specs:

Model: Custom

M/B: IBM - Node 1 Memory Card

CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E7- 2870 @ 2.40GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 32 kB, 256 kB, 30720 kB

Memory: 128 GB (max. installable capacity 128 GB)*

Network: bond0: fault-tolerance (active-backup), mtu 1500 
 eth0: 1000 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500 
 eth1: not connected

Kernel: Linux 4.9.30-unRAID x86_64

OpenSSL: 1.0.2k

 

Hopefully you guys can help me with this.

[SSD]

You might look at NoMachine and SplashTop as alternatives for RDP.

[DavyV97]

Thanks for the alternatives, I have already been looking at SplashTop but since it's a paid service I have put that option on hold.

 

Have been testing wit NoMachine but unfortunately it relies on the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which pins my resolution on 800x600.

Any other alternatives?

[uldise]

8 minutes ago, DavyV97 said:

Have been testing wit NoMachine but unfortunately it relies on the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter which pins my resolution on 800x600

i'm using Nomachine server on linux machines - when i connect to them remotely, i always get native resolution of these machines(highest for me is 1600x1200), so look at resolution server is running..

[DavyV97]

The server hasn't got dedicated graphics, just a little graphics chip on the motherboard for the onboard graphics (low resolution).

This is probably why RDP works at 1920x1080 while NoMachine works on 800x600, so probably no way to fix this.

Maybe it is possible to run different VM's within Windows 10 using Hyper-V and use RemoteFX vGPU to share a dedicated GPU (which I'll have to install obviously).

This way they will share the GPU and be able to run at higher resolutions using NoMachine???

 

I don't think UnRaid has a feature that let's different VM's share the same GPU?

[DavyV97]

So, I have installed a RX550. I  chose this card since it would fit in the server and wasn't too expensive. Plus, RemoteFX worked with my RX480 so I'd reckon this should work with the RX550 too. 

Unfortunately when starting the VM after assigning the GPU, the server crashes.

When both VNC and dedicated GPU selected I can see through VNC it boots the Windows logo but stops there.

Looking at the console I see this error the moment the VM starts:

 

Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 2d on CPU 0.

Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?

Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

 

Even when immediately stopping the VM, the server will still crash (just power down really) and reboot.

 

I have tried different settings (PCIe ACS override), tweaking the BIOS, set CPU to Emulated instead of passthrough.

Though, nothing helped this far.

 

An option would be to install Windows directly on the server to use RemoteFX, but with this I would lose the data protection UnRaid offers.

 

Has anybody ever experienced the problem I currently have? (and found the problem?)

Would there be other ways to use the data protection of UnRaid but use RemoteFX?