Proxmox as a host

Proxmox
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This was my original post from reddit “I’ve been tasked with looking into some old OAs that have some older boards in them at my company. On anything older then a supermicro X12-STL-F, when trying to boot into a 2022 usb stick OR by mounting the stick and running setup, I get a BSOD stating an issue with storport.sys, which I’ve had limited results researching this issue as it usually applies to a driver error with an already established OS. I do have RAID 0 and 1 configured per our SOP, which may have something to do with it? maybe leaving the RAID config out of the picture may allow me to boot into 2022? Same configuration boots into a 2019 stick with no issues what-so-ever. I’ve got like 3-4 of these boards I’d like to get this pushed and ready for deployment if possible.”

What I’m trying to do now per recommendation is “x11 as a proxmox host with windows vms,” but I’ve never used these environments before and am new to playing with these types of servers and creating VMs in general, and could use some guidance on how to get Windows Server 2022 running in any capacity on some of this older equipment, which would save my company a lot of resources. My research has brought me here, since the reddit is in restricted mode (for good reason, but I gotta use what I can when Googling). Basically looking for a solution to be able to utilize some of these older boards for VMM and replication that aren’t just taking to Windows Server 2022. I hope I’m in the right place!

Thanks guys.

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I’m not sure I’m understanding your setup, but it sounds like you’ve got PVE installed on your Supermicro machines and you’re having a hard time getting Windows Server to install in a VM. If that’s the case, the first things that come to mind are:

  • Passing through a USB stick for the installer could be an issue; instead, download the Windwos Server ISO and boot that on your VM.
  • I’d double-check that virtualization is enabled in the BIOS. You can do this from the command line with dmesg | grep DMAR. That should give you some output if VT-d is enabled in BIOS. If not, reboot and turn it on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case since it sounds like this hardware wasn’t running VMs in the past.

Edit: For clarification, looking for DMAR doesn’t directly tell you that VT-d is enabled, but my understanding is that the direct memory access tables won’t be present at all if VT-d is not enabled.

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OA - (Onsite Appliance) Supermicro Server running the X11 board. The issue was the RAID configuration and booting into Windows Server 2022. I was able to clear the config, and it booted to Windows server 2022 after that. Latest issue is the chipset drivers not loading correctly, I’ll have to do it manually for each one.