Newb with newb questions

token

Renowned Member
Mar 11, 2016
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Hello all, trying to get some type 1 hypervisor going on, trying to graduate from type 2s.

Surprised this isn't a sticky on how to post questions, for instance the tools you guys would want me to use to list setup, specs, testing etc. I would need a guide/tutorial to get me started on those.

Newb questions as follows:
I have an 'old' HP z800 (x2 5540 vt-x and vt-d2, 24 gigs ram), the rest of the hardware I'm not familiar with, such as the Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO SATA RAID Controller (when booted into windows, it has a fault as seen in device manager that windows cannot fix), and a LSI Adapter, SAS 3000 series, 8-port with 1068E (embedded into motherboard). I think these are causing me some grief in VM performance.

I have an Ubuntu Gnome KVM spun up and it is very slow, despite giving it 8 cores, 2 gigs of RAM and have played with various CPU settings, enable numa, cache write-through, cache write-back etc-- no matter what, the VM just drags really bad.

Does the 1068E need to be flashed into IT mode? If so any good guidance, because the only stuff I have found so far does not find the 1068E on my board, I have a feeling a lot of the guides/DIYs/Tutorials out there are for PCIe RAID cards with that chipset, and do not apply to the embedded.

Or is this simply due to testing this setup with only one hard drive in play and no cache drive?

I also get this code often when the VM is spun up-
TASK ERROR: command '/bin/nc6 -l -p 5900 -w 10 -e '/usr/sbin/qm vncproxy 101 2>/dev/null'' failed: exit code 1
 
I put Proxmox on another machine (Haswell i7, 32 gigs RAM) but re-using the same hard drive (old 2.5' from a laptop) from the z800- same issues. Switched to 1 TB HDD, re-installed, runs much better, so I suspect the laptop hard drive, its a 72000rpm but doesn't seem to hold up, maybe on it's way out.

Its still a bit slow in comparison to running VMware workstation on top of an OS though, maybe there is still some optimization possible- hoping to go baremetal to have the machine on 24/7 and have a decent number of VMs and containers running at the same time.

Another funny observation, logged into the GUI with a Windows Machine this time and the console into the VM performed better too. Originally I was using a Ubuntu Gnome laptop and the Chromium window would blink/tare and it wouldn't let me scroll down for more than a second before resetting to the top of the screen, and with the blink the window would ever so slowly shift to the right of the screen until running out of room. Kind of sad thinking about it.