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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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[–] [email protected] 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.

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

Have you automated creation?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

With that many Windows (gasp) ones, no... I'm afraid you are not

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

It's only insane if you have them all running at once.

[–] [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"....

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

Very few people need it but it’s awesome and a lot of fun and lets you spend more time in Linux than dealing with Windows. The VFIO Reddit and Arch wiki are great resources. I have GPU, USB, and Ethernet pass through on my Ubuntu machine and it works great, but I needed the Arch wiki to really figure out what I was doing wrong when I first set it up. Level1Techs is also a good resource on YouTube and forums because they are big into VFIO and SR-IOV. Next time you get a PC, make sure to look for more PCI lanes and bifurcation support on your motherboard. Gen 4 is a great option because it generally has enough lanes and the ram and ssd are much cheaper than Gen 5. GPU choice doesnt matter much but if you’ve got AMD watch out for the reset bug. Basically you can start a VM but once you quit it the cards state is unavailable for further use (eg a second VM session or reopening your DE if you’re using a single GPU setup) unless you restart your host. There are some workarounds but personally I’d avoid it if possible. Onboard graphics (iris or amd APU) are recommended. Older hardware can get cheap so good luck saving up if this is something you want to do!

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[–] [email protected] 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)

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.

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

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[–] [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.

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

Ok I’ll have to try this. The weird thing is my little test proxmox server is a 2013 trashcan. So this would be like a hackintosh running on Mac hardware. Would that technically be a hackintosh? I’m not really sure. According to the Apple license you can virtualize MacOS if it’s running on Mac hardware. I’m not sure if that requires MacOS as the hypervisor. Regardless this is not something I knew about. Very cool. Thanks for the info.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

There are many many many insane people who are running no virtual machines at all.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (11 children)

I have about twice this many VMs and about this many running at any given time.

I use Qubes btw

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[–] [email protected] 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] 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

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

Serious answer, I'm not sure why someone would run a VM to run just a container inside the VM, aside from the VM providing volumes (directories) to the VM. That said, VMs are perfectly capable of running containers, and can run multiple containers without issue. For work, our Gitlab instance has runners that are VMs that just run containers.

Fun answer, have you heard of Docker in Docker?

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Mutahar please log in to your main account

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Not VMs but I have way more docker containers. I run most things as containers which keeps the base OS nice and clean and free from dependency hell.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I mean, people collect all sorts of weird shit

[–] [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] 9 points 2 months ago

Yes, but usually they'd have a more robust VM management system to stay sane for long.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

On the joke, define "sane". 😬

On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than "I was bored". In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can't normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can't/don't want to use my phone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Hell to update them regularly 👀

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Nah, most of the windows ones don’t get updates any more and the Linux ones can get a script that updates on boot. Takes longer to start up but handles the job itself.

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

Yeah.

My home server runs that many, but it's a monster dual xeon.

The freebsd instances have a ton of jails, the Linux vms have a ton of lxc and docker containers.

It's how you run many services without losing your mind.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I've had physical esx servers running this many VMS simultaneously, and I can totally see why a hobbiest or dev would have a need for this many VMs on standby. You are sane, yes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I do have as many too at work.

I use one VM for each iteration of my automation software. Our factory has machines ranging from the 90s to present day, and they use different software environments to be programmed. In order to minimize the risk of data loss, we have one virtual machine with every software environment, that way if one gets corrupted, the damage is contained. It also makes them easier to export to new computers when we need to replace ours.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (3 children)

1000167081

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

*sane

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The biggest reason why I don't want maintain so many Vms is, because all the maintenance and updates that involve doing so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

And that's why there's a "-2" on the end of that arch vm - there was one before that I borked while trying to update it because I hadn't used it in so long.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

linux users are sane?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think you have a problem, there needs to be more to be normal.

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

insert MORE, MORE!-Kylo Ren meme here

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I guess you should use proxmox at this point 🤣

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

I always remove any virtual machines every time I'm done with it and reinstall if I need to use it again

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How much disk space have you got??

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

It's a terabyte SSD. I've currently got 136 GB left on it. I think part of it might be they're auto-expanding qcow2 images, so they don't actually take up the full space provisioned for them.

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

I have probably a couple of more Linux/BSD VMs than here (with some with GPU passthrough and one or two for ARM crossbuilding and so on) but only 2 Windows VMs - the only 2 I have legitimate licenses for.

But am I normal? Most would disagree. 😅

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

10, plain 11, 7, and funny enough, Server 2022 are all legit licenses (I can get a key for server through my university). Actually, I'm pretty sure the 11 one, I upgraded a Windows 7 VM to 10, then to 11.

Every other Windows version that needs it (11 LTSC, 8.1, and Vista), I just temporarily host a phony KMS server whenever it needs to be reactivated.

I apologize for talking so much about Windows on a Linux sub. May Stallman break into my house and give me 10 lashes as I slumber.

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

The Windows XP and Windows 7 I have are also from my university, from a long long time ago.😃

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