Roon ROCK build 175 running in a VM on an unraid server
Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)
Virtual network connected via ethernet
Description Of Issue
I just updated to build 175 and lost network connectivity of my Roon ROCK VM. I tried creating a fresh VM using the latest image and it also did not have network connectivity. I’m not sure what I can do to troubleshoot this. Can I download an older build anywhere to restore this back to a working setup?
Not sure. But it has been working stable for months now on previous builds. It only stopped working after this update. If I can just get a link to an old build download, I’ll be happy.
That’s pretty ridiculous. A virtual machine is not particularly special. They’re literally what most of the internet is built on top of. If a complex web application that handles thousands of simultaneous requests can run in a virtual machine, a simple music server should be able to. Why would I buy a special piece of hardware and burn extra electricity if I have a perfectly good server that can virtualize this simple application?
Anyways, I’m just asking for a download link to roll back - not any special support or troubleshooting. That’s not a big ask considering the price I paid for this software. It’s literally offered by nearly every open source and proprietary software company out there.
In any case, I spun up a new ubuntu VM to run Roon server within that and it works with the latest build. But now I’m wasting extra resources with the overhead of ubuntu.
I would be glad that it works with ubuntu and leave it at that. Roon does not like having old versions of software running in the wild so I don’t think you are gong to get a link to the old version.
Finally, it’s not at all uncommon for server applications not to work in some VMs unless they are written with VMs in mind. They expect to have full control of the system and when they don’t, they can fail…just as you have experienced.
Unfortunately, ROCK is only meant to be installed on one of our approved hardware configurations, and other configurations are unsupported, including VMs.
We’ve tried to make our docs clear about this:
We have only tested with the above-mentioned NUCs. It may work with other machines, but the drivers needed may not exist there. Try it out and let us know. We can not comment on whether any different hardware will work, as we have not tested it. We will not make any guesses, educated as they might be.
If you do manage to get it to run, that’s great, but we can not guarantee it will continue to work with future builds. Consider yourself warned.
Sorry there isn’t more we can do to help here. I’ve moved this over to the Tinkering section, so hopefully others from the Community will be able to help here.
You should at least offer build history downloads for people who have success with older builds. But that, combined with the lack of VM support is pretty pathetic for $500 software. Even free, open-source software has better support than this. I’ll recommend against folks using Roon in the future.
I am using Proxmox VE as the VM host, but I think ESXi could have the similiar problem if the virtualized network card set to virtio or passthrough. I would recommend change the network card model in PVE or ESXi to E1000, which available in both VM host. and try again.
The whole thing about RoonOS, besides that it’s free, is that it is a pared down version of an OS with just what is needed to run ROCK. Not sure if that benefit still holds if one runs ROCK under a VM.
Probably just as good to run RoonServer under a lightweight Linux in a VM or even Windows in a VM. I ran RoonServer, JShiver, Plex and Kodi, (RoonServer and Plex sometimes at the same time) in Windows on a Ubuntu VM without any problems.
The set of potential Roon subscribers. The set of people running VMs. Union probably pretty small, but whatever.