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There are sane people with this many VMs on a personal machine, right? RIGHT? (startrek.website)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Half of these exist because I was bored once.

The Windows 10 and MacOS ones are GPU passthrough enabled and what I occasionally use if I have to use a Windows or Mac application. Windows 7 is also GPU enabled, but is more a nostalgia thing than anything.

I think my PopOS VM was originally installed for fun, but I used it along with my Arch Linux, Debian 12 and Testing (I run Testing on host, but I wanted a fresh environment and was too lazy to spin up a Docker or chroot), Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora to test various software builds and bugs, as I don't like touching normal Ubuntu unless I must.

The Windows Server 2022 one is one I recently spun up to mess with Windows Docker Containers (I have to port an app to Windows, and was looking at that for CI). That all become moot when I found out Github's CI doesn't support Windows Docker containers despite supporting Windows runners (The organization I'm doing it for uses Github, so I have to use it).

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[–] cousinofjah 2 points 2 months ago

Yes but most of them are off lol

[–] slazer2au 2 points 2 months ago

Looks normal for testing stuff. I have 5ish in my desktop hypervisor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

You can say: "I use Arch, Fedora, Windows, MacOS, Gentoo, LFS, Debian, PopOS, and more, btw."

[–] wulf 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I run a different LXC on Proxmox for every service, so it's a bunch. Probably a better way to do it since most of those just run a docker container inside them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Why mix docker and VMs? Isn't docker sort of like a VM, an application-level VM maybe? (I obviously do not understand Docker well)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I like to run a hypervisor host as just that, a hypervisor host. The host being stable is important, and also reduce attack surface by only having it as that.

An LXC per service is somewhat overkill. A docker host running on LXC could likely run all the docker containers.

[–] olympicyes 1 points 2 months ago

I mentioned above, and not to spam, but there might be a use case that requires a different host distribution. Networking isolation might be another reason why. For 90% of use cases, you’re correct.

[–] wulf 1 points 2 months ago

LXC is much more light weight than VMs, so it's not as much overhead. I've done it this way in case I need to reboot a container (or something goes wrong with an update) without disrupting the other services

Also keeps it consistent since I have some services that don't run in docker. One service per LXC

[–] olympicyes 1 points 2 months ago

I have a real use case! I have a commercial server software that can run on Ubuntu or RHEL compatible distributions. My entire environment is Ubuntu. They also allow the server software to run in a docker container but the container must be running RHEL. Furthermore, their license terms require me to build the docker container myself to accept the EULA and the docker image must be built on RHEL! So I have an LXC container running Rocky Linux that gets docker installed for the purpose of building RHEL (Core is 8) imaged docker containers. It’s a total mess but it works! You must configure nested security because this doesn’t work by default.

Instructions here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-run-docker-inside-lxd-containers#1-overview

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I wouldn't call that terribly efficient.

I would do 2-3 VMs with docker and maybe a network share

[–] Heavybell 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I had a VM but somehow the virtual drive got corrupted? And it wouldn't let me install, update or uninstall VC++ runtime as a result. I'm gonna try again later, but it's a worrying start.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Me and my multiple personalities taking turns driving this sinking boat of a life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

GPU passthrough has always been one of those exciting ideas I’d love to dive into one day. My current GPU being a little older, has only 4GB of RAM. Oh the joy's of being a budget PC user. Thankfully it's more of a "would be nice rather" than an "actually need"....

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[–] billwashere 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Well I do but I have a machine with 3/4 of a terabyte of memory on it.

Work scraps are great sometimes.

How are you running the MacOS VMs. The machine I have is a cheese grater so that makes it easier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I found a prebuilt OpenCore for KVM. https://github.com/thenickdude/KVM-Opencore

I then changed the config.plist to make it think it was a 2019 Mac Pro.

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[–] olympicyes 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are you running macOS or Linux as your host? My MacBook is M1 and I found the performance running ARM windows and ARM Fedora via UTM (qemu) to be pretty good.

[–] billwashere 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

On the cheesegrater(2019 MacPro) it’s a little convoluted. During covid times it was my single box lab since it had so much memory (768TB). So I was running nested ESXI hosts and then VMs under that. I also have a M1 MacBook Pro that I had parallels run ARM VMs (mostly MacOS, Windows, and a couple of Debian installs I think).

I have been looking at VMWare alternatives at work so for the hypervisors I’ve been playing around.

I do this stuff for a living but I also do it home for fun and profit. Ok not so much profit. Ok no profit but definitely for the fun. And because I love large electric bills.

[–] olympicyes 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That’s a beast of a Mac. Wake on lan is your friend. I have the same problem with my Threadripper. I wrote a script that issues a WOL command to either start/unsuspend my Ubuntu machine so I can turn it off when not in use. It’s probably $70/month difference for me. Most of my virtualization is on Linux but I’ve moved away from VM Ware because QEMU/KVM has worked so well for me. You should check out UTM on the Mac App Store and see if that solves any of your problems.

ETA: https://mac.getutm.app/

[–] billwashere 1 points 2 months ago

Man this thread has taught me all sorts of things. I will definitely check out UTM. Thanks for that!!

[–] olympicyes 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have about that many. Looks good to me! I have two Windows VMs. One for work and presentations. One for games and Adobe. A bunch of random Linux VMs trying to get a FireWire card to work and a Windows 7 VM for the same reason. I’ve also for several Linux VMs trying out new versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian. A couple servers. Almost none of them are ever turned on because my real virtualized workloads run in docker or LXC! I never could get Mac VM to work but I have an AMD CPU and a MacBook so not too high priority.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Screen sharing from Linux is amusing though, so far I've yet to have anyone even mention it (hyprland so looks very different to Windows)

[–] glitch1985 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why would anybody need an OS other than the bottom one?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I think the answer is obvious. There are so many better alternatives available today. Some examples include:

Windows ME
Glorious Leader's Red Star OS
Temple OS
Don't use an operating system - sacrifice all your your time to studying the ways of the mighty Zarthadonatoxator instead. All hail Zarthadonatoxator! Zarthadonatoxator is the only true way!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If I could get vbox to work* on my laptop or find the drive to learn QEMU, then I would have plenty on there. For now I'm just stuck with plenty on my desktop running win10.

*I have installed it a few times on my Debian based distro, but I swear every time I do nothing to it and it destroys itself. Works fine one day, then the next I turn on my laptop, after the only changes being that I created and ran a VM and it decided to hate me and not even boot the program. I think I'm just cursed.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Bahah i have like 7 but im concerned by the fact i probably forgot the password to half of em xD

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

For windows I either use a mingw toolchain from mxe.cc or just run the msvc compiler in wine, works great for standard C and C++ at least, even when you use Qt or other third party libraries.

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