ROCK on a virtual machine?

[David_Cominsky (Ricky Rivits)]

Thanks,exactly what I wanted to hear.

[HIN_FAN_LAI]

yes. I use VM to run roon rock now

[David_Cominsky (Ricky Rivits)]

VMware PLayer is the real trick no extension…

[Nickpi]

ROCK on ProxmoxVE

First post all so be gentle I just got rock installed under proxmox using the information on this thread and until now have felt I’m banging my head against a brick wall. First I went into the bios of the proxmox machine looking for secure boot it was already off they was a second option next to it about custom or standard if secure boot was off it was set to custom changed to standard saved and rebooted. It still wouldn’t install and maybe this is the part which mostly made the difference in…

I am using a debian container.

Roon on Proxmox Container w/ Passthrough

I recently undertook a project to convert my existing Windows workstation over to Proxmox VE. The idea was that I would run Proxmox on the bare metal and convert my Windows deployment into a VM, passing through the devices using VFIO so it would appear to be standard workstation. I would then convert my Intel RAID10 Array over to ZFS and offload applications like Roon and Plex to run as LXC containers. For the most part, everything worked. But I ran into latency issues with my Topping D10 Balan…

1. Less overhead.
2. You can use usb audio, this did not work in a virtual machine.

[Chris_Roon (Chris)]

The idea is exactly to constrain ROON in the VM scenario, which is one of the nice things about VMs… you can assign the resources to it that the VM (or application) needs OR whatever you want it to use .

In general, I believe it’s bad practice to use the host machine for anything else than a hypervisor with VM’s, if you have bought your hardware for that specific use. If you’d install Roon server on the host machine along with a hypervisor (type 2) and VM’s, ROON would claim those resources ‘at will’ from all the VM’s running on it, and managing those resources would become a pain.

The overhead of the virtualization layer is hardly worth mentioning anymore these days. Buy hardware with lots of processor cores and memory, and all those resources are better spent on VM’s and / or Containers. Of course, in some scenarios Roon needs all those resources… but in that case, I wouldn’t use that host for any VMs and simply install ROCK stand-alone. Its either one or the other.

[Marian (I stand with Ukraine)]

@Chris_Roon

In general, I believe it’s bad practice to use the host machine for anything else than a hypervisor with VM’s, if you have bought your hardware for that specific use.

If that’s what you bought the hardware for, yes, although that is more of a cloud compute service provider scenario than typical home computing. I do get hardware with virtualization capabilities to be able to run VMs, but my VMs run occasionally, so my approach is more flexible than “either one or the other”.

[Chris_Roon (Chris)]

True, that’s another use case. It’s just that resource management gets a little daunting on a hybrid setup like that.

By the way, I’ve just managed to get Roon ROCK running as a VM, on a mini PC with an Intel I9 processor, with Linux EndeavourOS installed, on top of the KVM-QEMU hypervisor. It runs like a charm, and now I get to see exactly how many resources Roon uses. (Not a whole lot - 4vCPU’s and 4GB memory is enough). And if it’s not enough, I simply assign more resources.

[ipeverywhere]

This is actually an issue with most of the Linux based hypervisors out there. They run a small linux environment then some kind of web / distributed management on top of a KVM environment. Of the “commercial” hypervisors I’ve used you cannot run any software on the host itself. You shouldn’t be running any software on the host. There is no such thing as “only running VMs occasionally”. If you want to run something 24/7 it needs to be in a VM so the hypervisor can manage it. This also gives you portability to move the VM around.

@Marian

yes, although that is more of a cloud compute service provider

Not exactly when you look at the people who run various things, including Roon, on their Synology NAS hardware. Again, consider the Synology like a “commercial” hypervisor. It just happens to come with various slots for storage. You cannot run anything “on the host” but you can certainly deploy many VMs / containers for it to run and manage “virtually”.

A hypervisor alone is not complicated. It’s really not until do something like building an OpenStack environment in your home where “cloud compute” becomes “home compute”. But, it’s actually very efficient to run everything virtually managed by a hypervisor. Running stuff on the host just seems weird. Like… what if I need to reboot that stuff? I got to reboot the whole hypervisor? There should never be a need to reboot the hypervisor (outside of the occasional software updates).