Problems creating VMs on virtualised SCALE running on XCP-ng

[beagle]

Anyone having problems creating VMs when running SCALE virtualised?

I installed the latest SCALE nightly virtualised on a VM running on a XCP-ng host. (TrueNAS-SCALE-20.12-MASTER-20201209-072916)

VM specs: 4cores, 16GB RAM, 30GB disk and 1 NIC, nested virtualisation enabled.

On SCALE I've successfully created:
(1) a bridge (br0) with a fixed IP on the single NIC
(2) a RAIDZ2 pool based on 6 x 10GB virtual disks (30GB available)
(3) a ISO dataset to upload installation media

Then with the base system working I tried to create a Linux VM using mostly the default options:
(1) changed Boot Method to Legacy Bios
(2) unticked Start on Boot
(3) set Memory Size to 2GB
(4) set Disk Type to VirtIO, location to the only pool tank and size to 10GB
(5) set Network Adapter Type to VirtIO and attached it to the bridge br0
(6) on Installation Media I uploaded an installation ISO to the ISO dataset

The VM is created but it doesn't show on the Virtual Machines page. After moving to another page and back, the VM shows on the list.

I can start the VM and connect to VNC. The installation media loads and the initial installation screen does show up but as soon as I select an installation option SCALE reboots. I tried with a CentOS 7 and an Arch installation media with the same results.

I'll probably need to open a ticket on Jira for further investigation but since I'm new to TrueNAS I was wondering if I'm missing an obvious step somewhere.

Thank you for reading this far and for your help.

Cheers

 

[morganL]

We don't recommend (nor have we tested) VMs on Virtualized SCALE. That would be running one hypervisor on another hypervisor. It would be better to run any VMs you need outside of SCALE on the primary hypervisor.

Within virtualized TrueNAS SCALE, it would be OK to run containers.

 

[beagle]

Thank you @morganL

I'm running SCALE virtualised on my lab for testing purposes. I'll use this installation to test other features then and I'll install it on another server to test virtualisation.

An unrelated question: would SCALE be able to read an existing Linux mdam RAID?

Thinking on a future home server migration, the idea is to pull the RAID disks and after installing SCALE, put the disks back, mount the RAID (read-only), transfer the data to the new pool, unmount the RAID and remove the disks. After a while, once I'm happy all the data is ok, I can then re-use the old disks.

There are multiple offsite backups, but I would rather avoid restoring then if I could due to slow transfer speed.

 

[morganL]

An unrelated question: would SCALE be able to read an existing Linux mdam RAID?

Interesting question... I assume it may be possible with some CLI work, but it wasn't a requirement we have agreed on.

 

[beagle]

Interesting question... I assume it may be possible with some CLI work, but it wasn't a requirement we have agreed on.

Is it worth opening a ticket so it can be assessed? Even if it's not included in the GUI it would be useful to document the process.