I’ve set up a Windows 10 VM with VNC enabled - but I am unable to access the instance through the VNC tool.
It is unresponsive. I receive a grey/blank screen, similar to the color of the TrueNAS webui. This indicates that the VM is running in some capacity, however when I try to access the shell, it states “Error: VM agent isn’t currently running”. I am not sure what that could mean then.
Here is my suspicion:
Under “Disks”, I set the VM to running off of a zvol I created called “Win10”. Well the physical disk that this volume is on is in fact an older HDD. Could that make it too slow for a VM to run?
But I have been able to set up VMs by just setting the “Root Disk” size to some value (in GiB), but where then is that root disk stored?
In any case here is some additional into about my VM:
Autostart: Yes
Base Image: -
CPU: 4
Memory: 16 GiB
Secure Boot: No
Devices: None added except GPU.
GPU: NVIDIA Corporation TU102 [GeForce RTX 2080 Ti]
Root Disk: 20 GiB
Windows.iso
/dev/zvol/VMPool/Win10
NIC: eth0 (MACVLAN)
All other settings are default. Need some help.
Using a VNC viewer I was able to confirm that the VM is not booting properly, as shown in the images. When I place vnc://192.168.0.179:5900/ in the browser it shows a blank screen, but when I place it in the viewer you get the classical “no boot” shell looking screen that shows for failed to boot VMs in TrueNAS.
I guess the question is now, what do I have to configure when setting up the VM to get it to boot properly?
I am currently attempting the same thing. I did setup a Instance with a disk and the Windows 10 install CD. To boot on the CD you need to open VNC very quickly and press a key to start the installer when the CD requests it.
Though, I am stuck right after with the installer not finding the harddrive. My assumption is that Instances setup the disk as a VirtIO disk, one solution would be to mount the virtio-win driver CD as well and load drivers in the installer or setup the instance with a more classical emulated SATA controller. I am not sure how to do either so I am still investigating.
Thank you for your insight. I will try to repeat those steps to see if I can get further. If you have screenshots of the bootup, that would be helpful. I will try to collect some as well.
I could not upload picture yet when I sent my first message, I now can :).
This is what the “press any key” message looks like:
The next problem, the driver problem looks like this:
Thought, after looking in discourse, this seems to be a common problem with Windows in Incus so it might become a bit off topic in this thread. I am still looking around for a solution …
Thanks for those useful captures. Still exploring this too, will post when I have updates. EDIT: Please do post if you find a solution.
EDIT2: Specifically this is a Storage Controller driver issue. I am considering a few possibilities.
- The HDD I am using may be too old to be supported by the TrueNAS hypervisor drivers that are available, which is why I cannot see the storage device and why it is asking for a driver. If this is case, a new drive (such as an SSD) may fix the issue, but can’t confirm that for now.
- This step may require a manual install, which in turn requires adding a USB or CD/DVD drive to the VM, to then add the appropriate drivers which would then be searchable in this step in the installation. As for which drivers to install, people keep posting this link for Windows VirtIO drivers, but those seem to me to be only for after the installation (such setting up networking with networking drivers etc.). Unsure what is specifically needed here.
