Hello all. I’m a long-time watcher, first-time poster.
That said, I am aware of Tom’s liking to XCP-ng as a virtualization platform. Because of his videos on it, I’ve been seriously considering it as a virtualization host for myself (I own and run my small business and I don’t need much for a server - I use a Dell R720xd).
What I need are a few Windows VMs so that I can keep certain apps running in one location, and convenient for me to access when I’m away.
So far, I have limited experience with both ESXi 7 and ProxMox 7. I ran XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra in my home lab for a hot minute but didn’t stick with it because the learning curve for me at the time was beyond what I was willing to do for the application.
Now that I’m looking at changing the way I run my business servers and get more into virtualization, I’ve been doing some testing with running Windows VMs on ProxMox and am incredibly unhappy with how unstable Windows 11 has been on it. I understand there’s some tuning that may be necessary, but it seems like running the world’s most ubiquitous operating system should just work, especially considering I am not doing any PCI passthrough at all.
That said, I’m willing to delve deeper into XCP-ng/XO but I’m getting the impression that whole ecosystem is more geared towards clustered hosts and that’s just not what I’m planning to do.
So, that said, I’m looking for some input on what others in my position are doing/have done and maybe can give me a sanity check.
I have been running XCP-ng for 2 years now on a non-clustered HP DL-360 in my homelab. No complaints. I bought a second server for spares and cold standby backups, just to save power vs clustering. I use both XO and XCP-ng center, preferring the latter for my non-complex setup.
Mostly ubuntu VMs but also Windows just as a trial.
Most of the learning curve for me was understanding the storage options.
XCP-NG is certainly built to scale, but it does work well with a single host. We run lots of Windows servers for clients, a few Windows workstations, but we don’t currently have ANY Windows 11 VM’s running so I can’t offer much insight other that we have been slow to adopt Windows 11 due to issues when it was first released.
Since Windows 11 “requires” TPM 2.0 to be present, XCP-NG will not be a good choice yet.
Also did microsoft change the licensing to allow a desktop os in a VM? Or did you buy the VM license? Yes they are different, no Microsoft doesn’t seem to care, but it could be only one patch away from things not working. Personally I don’t care, but wanted to throw that out to make sure you knew the risks of desktop under a VM. Stupid rule, a license should be a license and run on whatever you have. I’m sure if has to do with the core based licensing, desktop is only allowed 1 or 2 physical processor (I can’t remember), so under a virtual machine you could have like 300 cores in a single processor config. Just a guess to the reasoning, but I wouldn’t put it past them to restrict us that way.
Unstable as in the VM literally just turns off on me whenever I’m running any kind of intensive application. No windows blue screen, no error generated in ProxMox. Just turns off. I haven’t done a lot of work into figuring out why, to be honest, I plan to look into it this weekend to make sure there’s not something about my setup that qualifies me as an “edge case” somehow…
I have seen this sentiment about Windows 11 a lot and I think I am understanding why. Besides the issues I’ve been having on the VM, I’ve had issues on bare metal that have supposedly been fixed, and the user experience feels too half-assed to me. Like Windows 10, but to a worse degree IMO, they wanted to revamp everything but stopped 3/4 of the way through and gave up. For example, to send a shortcut to the desktop for a file, you have to right click, then click more options which reveals the legacy context menu, then do the usual for sending a shortcut to desktop…
Thanks for the heads-up on licensing. I never even realized that a VM and bare metal license are different and can’t understand why it matters, but whatever. I’ll cross that bridge when I’m ready to settle on a solution and actually deploy it. Microsoft Licensing rules require a 2-yr degree to understand fully.
Windows 11 just turns off as a VM is a known issue with KVM/QEMU. This isn’t a ProxMox issue but rather KVM/QEMU issue. There are some discussions on the cause such as virto drivers. Right now they’re looking into it. Windows 10 works fine.
As someone mentioned TPM 2.0 as a requirement. There are ways around that. In ProxMox you can enable vTPM.