Danielx64 Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 (edited) I was just thinking about this, if I run my everyday OS in a VM, I figured that I could upgrade my computer and what not without needing to reinstall windows and all my software. Would any of you do the same? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGeorge Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 (edited) If your hardware is beefy enough, I guess you wouldn't see much difference. Your gaming performance would take a big hit, I suspect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim K Global Moderator Posted April 7, 2016 Global Moderator Share Posted April 7, 2016 Nope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danielx64 Posted April 7, 2016 Author Share Posted April 7, 2016 5 minutes ago, slamfire92 said: If your hardware is beefy enough, I guess you wouldn't see much difference. Your gaming performance would take a big hit, I suspect. I wonder if we would get to the day where that wouldn't matter 4 minutes ago, jjkusaf said: Nope. Why not? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim K Global Moderator Posted April 7, 2016 Global Moderator Share Posted April 7, 2016 Because I wouldn't. I use VM just to mess around ... not to get any "serious" work done. Plus you'll always have a performance hit on your "everyday OS". Just not worth it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe User Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 The amount of time to install and run another OS and maintain it properly would eventually be longer than the time needed to re-install your software when you move to a new computer. Basically, you'll need a better reason to do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrynalyne Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 Just now, Joe User said: The amount of time to install and run another OS and maintain it properly would eventually be longer than the time needed to re-install your software when you move to a new computer. Basically, you'll need a better reason to do it. Maybe if your hardware sucks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danielx64 Posted April 7, 2016 Author Share Posted April 7, 2016 3 minutes ago, Joe User said: The amount of time to install and run another OS and maintain it properly would eventually be longer than the time needed to re-install your software when you move to a new computer. Basically, you'll need a better reason to do it. How so? Just install the base OS, VM software and your pretty much done. (unless you need to install drivers and that doesn't take long). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe User Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 2 minutes ago, adrynalyne said: Maybe if your hardware sucks. Care to elaborate on that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe User Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 (edited) 7 minutes ago, Danielx64 said: How so? Just install the base OS, VM software and your pretty much done. (unless you need to install drivers and that doesn't take long). Ok, let's just assume it's Windows 10 with VMWare. So you have to maintain the host OS, and VMWare. Now your VM is running another copy of Windows that you also need to maintain. So, you've added in a level of complexity to attempt to save time when the next computer is purchased. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dragontology Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 No. "Why?" is the more important question than "why not?". When I decided to go to Windows 10 and my wife complained, I told her I would happily set her up a VM for Windows 7. Start it at boot and have it go full screen. She said no, that's alright, and has since acclimated to Windows 10. My hardware does not suck. I have a Xeon 1231 v3, 16GB RAM, and a 3GB R9 280 GPU. I have the Intel virtualization technology set up, and that was not easy. Messing with the BIOS and fiddling with Windows services. They don't really make it easy. I needed that to get Nox to work. Basically it's a VM for Android, all inclusive. Unfortunately it's only KitKat from a few years ago, they haven't updated to Marshmallow or even Lollipop. But it's neat. It "just works." I would like to learn Linux more, but I'm lazy. No real need to do it. I have the know-how and the bandwidth, and the hardware. I would probably start with Ubuntu since it's simple. I know about Mint but I'm not a fan of KDE. Even with Unity, Gnome feels more mature. KDE wants too badly to be Windows 95. Even though Gnome leans more toward OS X, I feel like it's a more mature platform and more natural to work with. Just my opinion, though. So I could do that. And I'm sure if 16.04 isn't out yet, it will be soon. So the latest and greatest. I just don't see a reason. Convince me. I have the space. What do I stand to gain, aside from "Hey I did this thing because I can (and because some guy on the Internet said so)"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrynalyne Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 (edited) 33 minutes ago, Joe User said: Care to elaborate on that? Simple. I run a 5960x w/32GB DDR4 and an 850 Pro SSD on my workstation and VMs are blazing fast. I do not believe I am wasting any time at all. In fact, I don't even shut them down, ever. Never misses a beat on anything, be it VM or native. Edited April 7, 2016 by adrynalyne Danielx64 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danielx64 Posted April 7, 2016 Author Share Posted April 7, 2016 14 minutes ago, Joe User said: Ok, let's just assume it's Windows 10 with VMWare. So you have to maintain the host OS, and VMWare. Now your VM is running another copy of Windows that you also need to maintain. So, you've added in a level of complexity to attempt to save time when the next computer is purchased. Not if you run a very minimal install of linux with vmware player on the top of it. This get done on servers all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vcfan Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 2 hours ago, slamfire92 said: If your hardware is beefy enough, I guess you wouldn't see much difference. Your gaming performance would take a big hit, I suspect. not if you're using gpu passthrough Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danielx64 Posted April 7, 2016 Author Share Posted April 7, 2016 4 minutes ago, vcfan said: not if you're using gpu passthrough Noob question about this, how do I enable it in vmware player? Or do I need something else? Also would my TV card work as well? It one of those one that like a pcie but it shows up as a usb controller in windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Supervisor Posted April 7, 2016 Supervisor Share Posted April 7, 2016 Hello, Sure. Lots of companies do this. It's called VDI (virtualized desktop infrastructure). Regards, Aryeh Goretsky Dick Montage and Depicus 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xahid Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 You are thinking something similar done by Joanna Rutkowska & she made a Qubes. goretsky 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGeorge Posted April 7, 2016 Share Posted April 7, 2016 8 hours ago, vcfan said: not if you're using gpu passthrough I was under the impression there was still a penalty. Even better if not 8 hours ago, vcfan said: not if you're using gpu passthrough I was under the impression there was still a penalty. Even better if not Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeerFan Posted April 10, 2016 Share Posted April 10, 2016 I don't see enough of a benefit to it in a home setup to outweigh the costs, so nope. VMs at home are for fun / testing / specific needs; not main desktop use. Jim K and T3X4S 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinetheo Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 On 4/7/2016 at 9:27 PM, Danielx64 said: I was just thinking about this, if I run my everyday OS in a VM, I figured that I could upgrade my computer and what not without needing to reinstall windows and all my software. Would any of you do the same? Why would you have to?? For Linux stuff yes I can agree as it changes and you can screw something up easily. My solution was to switch to WIndows instead of dual booting and using a VM with turnkeylinux for web development so I can clone the VM if I want to make changes etc. BUt I do not know if that is what you are doing? Backup your stuff with onedrive and make an install folder on a partition or seperate disk. I still have a 2010 era 1 TB hd. It no longer boots but I have a folder called Backup and I put install programs there and save my actual data to the cloud in case I need to do a re-image. A second drive is a lot less hassle and a cheap mechanical disk is perfect for large files you need to read and write but not run or boot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raa Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 Only for testing things where I knew stuff was going to break! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dick Montage Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 Yup, every day at work under VDI. Performance hit? Not noticeable when all I'm doing is office work. goretsky and satysin 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_D0lph1n Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 I think how feasible this is depends on your hardware and your computer usage. I personally don't see the point, though I have certainly thought of this idea before. First, I don't have the hardware to pass devices to the VM; my CPU doesn't support VT-d or other device pass-through technology. Since I play a lot of games, this would result in an unacceptable performance decrease in the games I play as the VM wouldn't be able to access the GPU. I think this would be useful only if you are operating in a high-reliability environment. Having your main OS in a VM could increase reliability via checkpointing (though you would have to drop back into the host OS to create the checkpoint). In general, I don't have an issue with wiping out my OS install, reinstalling a new OS, and then redownloading/reinstalling my programs. I've done that with my main desktop at least 6 times in the 4 years I've owned it. So no, I wouldn't run my main OS in a VM as I don't gain anything from doing so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
br0adband Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 If I could build my dream machine which would have 128GB of RAM in it, then yes I would: I'd set up an 80GB RAMdisk (easy to do actually) then create a 75GB virtual hard drive on that RAMdisk and install my day to day OS on it (Windows 7 Professional x64, maybe even OSX El Capitan depending on my mood) and run it from there with mirrored backups to SSD every 15 minutes just in case. People these days see things like the newest NVMe SSDs which can push read speeds of around 2.5GB/s (yes that's Gigabytes per second) and writes of about 800MB/s (that's Megabytes per second) - such a machine with DDR4 RAM would be capable of read speeds in excess of 25-30GB/s and writes at the same speed or slightly less which means even the fastest NVMe SSDs would look like they're standing still vs my day to day OS running purely from RAM. I built a machine with 32GB years ago, Windows 7 Pro x64 as the host OS and then set up a 24GB RAMdisk, then used that for a 20GB virtual hard drive and installed Windows 7 Pro x86 as the guest OS and let's just say it was exceedingly fast: booted from cold startup in about 5 seconds (was 8 seconds till I just made the virtual network card use a static IP, the DHCP was slowing it down), shut down in about 1.5 seconds, had reads/writes around 18GB/s (DDR3) and was fun to play around with but the limitation of just 20GB wasn't enough to make real use of it. 80GB would be more than enough to run Windows daily without issues - my system partition is hardly ever larger (current one is 80GB, btw). SSDs are getting faster all the time, sure, but pure RAM is still going to leave it standing still for many many years to come, unfortunately getting a machine with 128GB of RAM in it would be quite the expense not only because the RAM itself is expensive but also the number of slots required. But then again, Crucial has this for only $1169 so, not as expensive as I suspected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BinaryData Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 (edited) 4 hours ago, Nik L said: Yup, every day at work under VDI. Performance hit? Not noticeable when all I'm doing is office work. Probably have a super beefy server or cluster running it. I know at work we have portable laptops, but the devs use VDI. According to what I've been told, they can use any laptop or pc, and connect to the network as long as the VPN works. I've never used it this way, so I'm clueless. Anyways, I want to know the specs of that server, I died when I installed 1TB physical memory to 50 Dell R830s (or 820s, they all look a like to me ) Edit: BudMan's been working with me to setup a pretty beefy ESXi Box for something similar to this. The goal is to setup a lab and be able to test whatever I want on a variety of OS's, or do Pen Testing. Currently, He's torturing me with Networking I want to be able to login to any amount of VMs I want, and test. Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8.x, Ubuntu (13.xx+), CentOS, etc.. I have a lot I want to learn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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