To clarify I am not asking about a dedicated machine running something like Proxmox or Esxi. My question is about VMs running on your daily use machine on something like VirtualBox, VM ware fusion, parallels etc
Proxmox backup server on HyperV
Saves me an extra device basically.
Occasionally WSL for AI stuff but it’s annoyingly fragile frankly.
I have my main/gaming rig that I use for everything unrelated to my career, and I run a Hyper V VM on/with it that I strictly use for just my daily job. (Work from home sysadmin for an MSP)
The company I work for provided me with hardware that I can connect at home and use, but it’s much more convenient for me to get everything done utilizing all of my monitors and gaming hardware and not having to have two physical computers set up. The company doesn’t care and I keep the work VM pretty isolated from everything else (well, as much as you can with a Hyper V VM and still get all of the functionality I crave.)
Have you considered a physical KVM switch? If you have, why did you decide against it?
Are you doing GPU partitioning?
There’s really no need for a KVM switch, I think having two physical computers to deal with in my case would just complicate things. Running the VM for my work life during work hours and then shutting it down once I’m off the clock is super simple already.
As far as GPU partitioning, all of the clients I work with are spending their day working with things like Excel and Outlook, so nothing graphically demanding.
Fair enough.
I am almost 90 per cent certain that my work won’t let me get away with a VM, but heh, who knows…
Yes. My main “prod” server was my Hyper-V VM on my gaming machine. I’m in the process of migrating out of it. Or maybe find a nice way to migrate this VM.
Nope. No VMs. Don’t know why would I if I have a dedicated XCP-NG pool for that.
Not always, I only have a laptop. But I do have a terraform setup that quickly deploys a gitlab runner on my laptop for when I need it, then I destroy it when I’m done with it. Uses the libvirt provider, a CoreOS image, and ignition to configure and start the runner service immediately.
- Plex
- CouchPotato
- Sonar
- SabNZBd
- PFSense
- PiHole
Then on RaspberryPi’s:
- HomeAssistant
- OctoPrint
That’s cool. What OS are you running on the VM? How do you access these services, only from your workstation or across the home network? Is the machine always on so that you can access your media/PiHole?
I’m running VMwares ESXi on an dedicated Fujitsu Primergy box (old hardware), it’s on 24/7 in the cupboard under the stairs.
Plex has it’s own app on various devices, smartphone, console, etc.
PFSense comes with the ability to setup a VPN connection, so I use that to connect to home when I want to watch stuff on the Plex Server. The Sonar/SabNZBd/CouchPotato is mostly a set and forget thing.
ESXi is handy for whenever I want to try something out without busting up any existing VMs I have setup.
Work machine is now a VM on my desktop for better performance than my low spec ultra book. This runs great on VMware workstation
I used to, but once I got a server (my first server was just an old desktop) I moved everything running 24/7 to that. Why wouldn’t I? Makes it easier to shut my desktop down and whatnot, plus I can get to whatever is running on other machines too (eg: laptop, and maybe phone/tablet?)
Back at my old job I was able to work from home and they required windows. Using Microsoft HyperV I had 2 windows server 2022 vm’s running on my laptop, setup for active directory. I was triple booting windows 10, 11 and Fedora Linux. Both my windows installs were running the vm’s and my Windows 11 install was joined to the domain. I had to set the vm’s to shut down on system reboot or power off as using the pause feature only worked if the reboot/shutdown returned to the same os. Worked great when it was setup. After I left that job and no longer worked from home I wiped windows and stuck to booting Linux only.
OPNSense, WeKan, home assistant, Jellyfin. Photoprism. As the host is always on running the firewall, the energy used by the other lught services is quite minimal.
Multipass
My work-from-home workstation always has a VM or two running the test/dev environment for the tasks I’m working on at work. They are VBox instances provisioned/managed by Vagrant.
They are CentOS7 instances, each running a test database, usually a text editor, “tail -F” monitoring log output, and various daemons/services specific to my workplace’s internal infrastructure. The host system is running Slackware 15.0.
Yes. Stuff.
WSL2 Ubuntu and today I installed Linux Mint with VMWare to play around a bit and I like it.
I have Ubuntu 16 VMs running old versions of our app so I can test against the new stuff.
I also run two postgres and two redis servers in docker to test migrations of those apps.