Tuesday Tech Tip - Hosting Windows Virtual Machines with Proxmox

[@45Drives]

Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction 00:57 - Installing Drivers 01:45 - Creating a Windows Virtual Machine inside Proxmox 03:21 - Mounting the ISO file 03:55 - Installing Windows Server 2019 in Proxmox 04:49 - Loading/Installing Drivers 07:56 - Outro

[@nono_ct200]

Thanks for this Series, altough i'd say that i'm an advanced user I still have some understanding Problems. First off: I've always used Virtio SCSI as Storage Controller and Virtio Block as Drive Connector, are there Perfomance differences from SCSI to virtio ? Second: After you installed the Qemu GA and Checked the Drivers with the provided Installer again the Installer ended with a somehow error message and as seen in the video it rolled back some changes, is this normal or not? in the end I want to thank the Team from 45Drives for their great work in the Opensource world ;)

[@45Drives]

First off, thanks for the kind feedback! Good catch on the error, seems some drivers may have been unloaded, they can be patched in later through the windows device manager. This seems to happen on windows server (maybe a security setting?) more so than windows 10. As for Virtio block vs scsi, personally we've seen performance benefits in using scsi instead. But, there's definitely some good future content in benchmarking various device controllers and storage devices.

[@davebilson]

I have a desktop computer with 128gb RAM (non ECC), Threadripper 1950x, Nvidia 2080TI running Windows 10 Pro. Is it viable to install Proxmox onto this desktop computer and passthrough HDD, USB and GPU / AUDIO?

[@Mobay18]

This will be a hassle to keep up to date in a Enterprise environment. If you have seen how often VMWare updates its drivers, you will know why it is important.

[@45Drives]

It definitely can be a bit of an overhead for sure! Thankfully there's a number of tools that can help with this process. We talked in the first proxmox clustering video about creating template VMs. Often in windows-heavy shops we see people maintaining a single master VM with up to date drivers- and then using that as a template to provision all of their other VMs. This limits the scope of your continued driver based maintenance to a single VM.

[@timmitchell9021]

The balloon driver doesn't fix a problem with memory "ballooning out," it allows for dynamic memory management. You can check the proxmox and ubuntu documentation for further clarification. Also wanted to note that you referred to the netkvm driver as "the paravirtualized driver." All of these drivers are paravirtualized, meaning that the guest driver is able to communicate more directly with the host. It is "aware" that it is running in a virtualized environment. Overall, not your best video, guys. I'm usually a big fan of 45Drives content, but this one, not so much.