They’re also useful for anyone running KVM as\u00a0a hypervisor – not just specific to unRAID.<\/p>\n
Before you begin<\/h2>\n\n- Makes sure you have access to your Windows license. If you upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 for free this is really important. If you haven’t already, follow the steps here\u00a0in “Before you shutdown Windows”<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- Your hardware must be capable of processor virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD-V), and it must be enabled in your BIOS. Depending on what you plan to do with your VM, you may need to meet other hardware requirements<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- unRAID must have VMs enabled and configured. An important step here is to download the VirtIO Drivers ISO<\/li>\n
- unRAID needs to have User Shares created to hold the virtual machine images; by default, these are created for you by a new installation at \/mnt\/user\/domains\/<\/em><\/li>\n
- Check to make sure that your User Share (above) has enough room for the full size of your Windows Operating System hard drive. You’re going to copy the entire hard drive including the empty space.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
By default, most of these things were done already on my machine, but it’s good to check them before proceeding.<\/p>\n
If you’re unfamiliar with unRAID and how to take those steps, they\u00a0are described in the “System Preparation” section of the unRAID manual quite well<\/a>.<\/p>\nAdd a new Virtual Machine<\/h2>\n
From your unRAID web UI (e.g. http:\/\/tower), perform the following steps.<\/p>\n
\n- On the\u00a0VMs\u00a0<\/em>tab, click the\u00a0Windows 10\u00a0<\/em>template (or template for your version of Windows).<\/li>\n
- Click on the switch for the\u00a0Basic View\u00a0<\/em>to toggle it to the\u00a0Advanced View\u00a0<\/em>(in the upper-right corner of the screen) if it isn’t already set.<\/li>\n
- Configure the VM with the following settings:\n
\n- Name your VM whatever you wish: For this example, I’m using “Windows 10”<\/li>\n
- CPU Mode:<\/em> Host Passthrough<\/li>\n
- Logical CPUs:<\/em>\u00a0However many you wish (at least one)<\/li>\n
- Initial Memory \/ Max Memory:<\/em> at least 2GB is recommended<\/li>\n
- Machine:\u00a0<\/em>i440fx-* (whatever the newest is)<\/li>\n
- BIOS:\u00a0<\/em>SeaBIOS<\/li>\n
- Hyper-V:\u00a0<\/em>Yes<\/li>\n
- OS Install ISO: <\/em>Leave\u00a0empty<\/li>\n
- VirtIO Drivers ISO:<\/em> Select the virtio-win*.iso that (should have been) downloaded as part of enabling VMs on unRAID.<\/li>\n
- VirtIO Drivers CDRom Bus:<\/em>\u00a0IDE<\/li>\n
- Primary vDisk Location:\u00a0<\/em>Auto<\/li>\n
- Primary vDisk Bus:<\/em> IDE<\/li>\n
- Primary vDisk Type:<\/em> raw<\/li>\n
- Primary vDisk Size:<\/em> 0G (You’ll be overwriting this file in the next step)<\/li>\n
- Graphics Card:<\/em> VNC<\/li>\n
- VNC Video Driver:<\/em> QXL<\/li>\n
- VNC Password:<\/em> Set it if you’d like – this is how you’ll access the ‘screen’ of the running VM<\/li>\n
- VNC Keyboard:<\/em> Set to the right language for your OS<\/li>\n
- Sound Card:<\/em> None (or select one if your device supports passthrough)<\/li>\n
- Network MAC:<\/em> this is set randomly, though you can change it.<\/li>\n
- Network Bridge:<\/em> br0<\/li>\n
- USB Devices:<\/em> I recommend leaving all unchecked for now.<\/li>\n
- USB Mode:<\/em> 2.0 (EHCI) is what I found worked for me.<\/li>\n
- Other PCI Devices:<\/em> I recommend leaving all unassigned until you confirm the VM launches correctly.<\/li>\n
- Uncheck Start VM after creation<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- Hit\u00a0Create.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/windows_vm_settings_create.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCopy the OS Drive to an image<\/h2>\n
Next up, you need to copy the data from your OS drive to an virtual disk image that the VM can boot off of.<\/p>\n
\n- Identify the disk that contains your Windows Operating System. You can find it by looking in the unRAID web UI in the\u00a0Main\u00a0<\/em>tab under\u00a0Unassigned Devices<\/em>. Look for the drive that you booted windows off of before you installed unRAID. Make note of the disk id (e.g. sdb, sdc, sde, etc.)<\/li>\n
- SSH into your unRAID system as root. By default unRAID doesn’t have a root password, but you should have set a strong one by now… right?<\/li>\n
- Enter the following command to convert the physical disk\n
qemu-img convert -p -O raw \/dev\/sdX<\/strong> \/mnt\/user\/domains\/Windows\\ 10<\/strong>\/vdisk1.img<\/pre>\n\n- Replace\u00a0sdX<\/strong> with the drive id for your Windows OS installaton<\/li>\n
- Replace\u00a0Windows\\ 10\u00a0<\/strong>with the name you gave your Virtual Machine (if you need to see what it is run the ls \/mnt\/user\/domains<\/em> command to see what it’s name is on disk)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- Wait. It’ll take a while, assuming you have a reasonably large OS installation disk.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Start your Windows VM & Install the VirtIO Drivers<\/h2>\n
Because Windows is now running as a Virtual Machine on KVM, it will think there is new “hardware” and will require (and benefit from) having the right drivers installed.<\/p>\n
\n- In the unRAID\u00a0VMs<\/em> tab, click on your newly created VM and click\u00a0Start
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/windows_vm_start.png\")
<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n- After the VM has started, you can VNC into the machine and interact with it. You can do this one of two ways.\n
\n- Click on the running Windows VM and select “VNC Remote”<\/li>\n
- (Preferred)<\/strong> Install a VNC client like TightVNC <\/a>and connect to the VM directly. To do so, you’ll need to know the IP address of your server and connect to the VNC port of the VM (which is listed next to the running VM)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- In Windows File Explorer, navigate to the VirtIO virtual CD-Rom (likely disk D:\\)<\/li>\n
- Navigate to\u00a0Balloon > w10 > amd64<\/em>\n
\n- Or your specific version of Windows and Architecture<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- Right click on the .inf file (i.e.\u00a0balloon.inf<\/em>) and click install. (You may need to enable the viewing of file extensions to find the right file)
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/windows_vm_drivers.png\")
<\/a><\/li>\n- Repeat the above process for each of the following folders\n
\n- NetKVM<\/li>\n
- vioserial<\/li>\n
- viostor<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- You may want to check Windows Device Manager to make sure there are no devices which have yellow warning exclamations next to them – if so, you’ll likely need to install an additional driver.<\/li>\n
- When done with the driver installation, navigate to the\u00a0guest-agent\u00a0<\/em>folder and double click on qemu-ga-x64.msi<\/em> to install the QEMU\/KVM guest agent.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Shutdown the VM & update disk settings<\/h2>\n
Now that you know that the VM boots and you’ve got the drivers installed, you can stop the VM and update the physical disk to use the VirtIO bus which will give you better performance.<\/p>\n
\n- Stop the Windows VM. You can do this one of two ways – one, by initiating a Shutdown from within Windows. Or, you can click on the VM image in unRAID and select\u00a0Stop<\/em> which will also gracefully shut down Windows.<\/li>\n
- In the unRAID web UI, in the VMs<\/em> tab, select the Windows VM and select Edit<\/em><\/li>\n
- Change the following settings:
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/windows_vm_disks.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n- Primary vDisk Bus:<\/em> VirtIO<\/li>\n
- VertIO Drivers ISO:<\/em> delete the entry<\/li>\n
- Restart the VM and make sure it’s operating correctly.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Reactivate your Windows license<\/h2>\n
Windows checks it’s license validity based on your machine’s hardware. Any time you change the hardware, Windows needs you to reactivate your license. You’ll need to run through the activation steps in the VM to re-activate your Windows license because Windows will think you just changed a lot of hardware.<\/p>\n
To do that, search for “Activation” from the Windows 10 Start menu. From there, you should be able to follow the prompts to activate your copy of Windows. Somewhere along the way, in smallish font, it’ll ask you if you recently changed hardware. Click that option and go from there – i.e. log into your Microsoft Account, select the machine\/license associated with this Windows installation.<\/p>\n
(Optional) Remove Unneeded Software & Drivers<\/h2>\n
Because your old Windows machine had a lot of device specific drivers installed on it to operate on your hardware, you may have a lot of cruft that can now be removed. Log into your Windows machine and take a stroll through the “Add or Remove Programs” menu to see if there’s anything that can be removed. For me, I could uninstall any Intel and RealTek Drivers, ASUS motherboard features, etc. that were no longer relevant. It’s a nice thing to slim up the now VM’d Windows OS.<\/p>\n
(Optional) Optimize the Window VM<\/h2>\n
The unRAID wiki has a good set of steps to consider to optimize your Windows VM<\/a>. I personally don’t believe in disabling the search indexer, but most of the other tips are worth while.<\/p>\n(Optional) Reduce \/ Shrink the size of the VM image<\/h2>\n
Now, you’re probably saying to yourself… geez, I don’t need a XXX GB image file that just happened to be the size of your old OS hard drive just to run Windows. You probably want to slim that down.\u00a0Here’s instructions on exactly how to do that<\/a>.<\/p>\nLet me know if I missed anything here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because I was turning my Windows 10 Pro server into an Linux (unRAID) machine I already had a Windows installation running on the bare metal that I had spent a fair bit of time setting up. I didn’t want to lose that installation and the work put into it. So, rather than starting over with … Continue reading Convert a Windows Installation into a unRAID (KVM) Virtual Machine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[375,344,367,377,376,139],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-kvm","tag-linux","tag-unraid","tag-virtual-machine","tag-vm","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3350,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions\/3350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
By default, most of these things were done already on my machine, but it’s good to check them before proceeding.<\/p>\n
If you’re unfamiliar with unRAID and how to take those steps, they\u00a0are described in the “System Preparation” section of the unRAID manual quite well<\/a>.<\/p>\n From your unRAID web UI (e.g. http:\/\/tower), perform the following steps.<\/p>\n Next up, you need to copy the data from your OS drive to an virtual disk image that the VM can boot off of.<\/p>\n Because Windows is now running as a Virtual Machine on KVM, it will think there is new “hardware” and will require (and benefit from) having the right drivers installed.<\/p>\n Now that you know that the VM boots and you’ve got the drivers installed, you can stop the VM and update the physical disk to use the VirtIO bus which will give you better performance.<\/p>\n Windows checks it’s license validity based on your machine’s hardware. Any time you change the hardware, Windows needs you to reactivate your license. You’ll need to run through the activation steps in the VM to re-activate your Windows license because Windows will think you just changed a lot of hardware.<\/p>\n To do that, search for “Activation” from the Windows 10 Start menu. From there, you should be able to follow the prompts to activate your copy of Windows. Somewhere along the way, in smallish font, it’ll ask you if you recently changed hardware. Click that option and go from there – i.e. log into your Microsoft Account, select the machine\/license associated with this Windows installation.<\/p>\n Because your old Windows machine had a lot of device specific drivers installed on it to operate on your hardware, you may have a lot of cruft that can now be removed. Log into your Windows machine and take a stroll through the “Add or Remove Programs” menu to see if there’s anything that can be removed. For me, I could uninstall any Intel and RealTek Drivers, ASUS motherboard features, etc. that were no longer relevant. It’s a nice thing to slim up the now VM’d Windows OS.<\/p>\n The unRAID wiki has a good set of steps to consider to optimize your Windows VM<\/a>. I personally don’t believe in disabling the search indexer, but most of the other tips are worth while.<\/p>\n Now, you’re probably saying to yourself… geez, I don’t need a XXX GB image file that just happened to be the size of your old OS hard drive just to run Windows. You probably want to slim that down.\u00a0Here’s instructions on exactly how to do that<\/a>.<\/p>\n Let me know if I missed anything here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because I was turning my Windows 10 Pro server into an Linux (unRAID) machine I already had a Windows installation running on the bare metal that I had spent a fair bit of time setting up. I didn’t want to lose that installation and the work put into it. So, rather than starting over with … Continue reading Convert a Windows Installation into a unRAID (KVM) Virtual Machine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[375,344,367,377,376,139],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-kvm","tag-linux","tag-unraid","tag-virtual-machine","tag-vm","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3350,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions\/3350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Add a new Virtual Machine<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
<\/a><\/p>\nCopy the OS Drive to an image<\/h2>\n
\n
qemu-img convert -p -O raw \/dev\/sdX<\/strong> \/mnt\/user\/domains\/Windows\\ 10<\/strong>\/vdisk1.img<\/pre>\n
\n
Start your Windows VM & Install the VirtIO Drivers<\/h2>\n
\n
\n<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n\n
\n
\n<\/a><\/li>\n\n
Shutdown the VM & update disk settings<\/h2>\n
\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
Reactivate your Windows license<\/h2>\n
(Optional) Remove Unneeded Software & Drivers<\/h2>\n
(Optional) Optimize the Window VM<\/h2>\n
(Optional) Reduce \/ Shrink the size of the VM image<\/h2>\n