New facination with virtualization

[SteeleDragon78]

Recently i have found myself bored with my usual geeky interests (WOW, battletech, d&d) and got turned onto virtualbox. I originally tried to use it to run some older win xp era games that due to MS killing securom support i couldn't play on my current machine, nor would they work in linux.

I got sucked in hard, playing with installs of both old and obscure OS, and now rather than watch TV when i get home i fire up my virtualbox and mess around with these. I have win xp, 98, 95, manjaro linux, fedora, solaris, mint, mac os mojave, and sparkylinux. i tried to spin up chrome os but ran into some issues with the USB boot options in virtualbox and trashed a jumpdrive doing so.

I'm curious who else here has a similar fascination with virtualbox and if anyone else has similar experiences and such, or am i just geeking out here on my own.

[otakuneko]

When planning my new rig I was actually heavily tempted to build an ESX host instead of a traditional desktop. I would've then continued to use my old desktop and simply accessed VMs on the ESX. Eventually I decided against it but the design philosophy carried over. As a result my desktop serves as an excellent testbed for trying things in VM before making changes to one of my actual servers, and I have more than enough room to carve out a small piece for a permanent Incredible Pbx VM.

[TheSHAD0W]

Note that most of the new Intel exploits deal affect VM isolation, and the mitigation measures take a large toll on processing power. The older the chip, the worse the mitigations will hit performance. If you're not that concerned with isolation, depending on the OS you can disable some of those mitigations; otherwise, you may want to consider switching to a Ryzen or Threadripper.

[Deserted]

When planning my new rig I was actually heavily tempted to build an ESX host instead of a traditional desktop. I would've then continued to use my old desktop and simply accessed VMs on the ESX.

I've done something like that a few times. First was on a Windows 98 or 2000 host, running 98 in VirtualPC (back before Connectix sold it to MS). It was great because I had it set to revert to snapshot at the end of every run. More recently, when I first built my current workstation, I had VMWare on a Linux host with a number of guest machines, including WinXP, Win7, Slackware, and a handful of others. Those VMs I saved and still run for certain purposes, but I moved to a Win7 host (because games). (My number 1 use for them is testing my programs. #2 is games and apps that don't like modern Windows.)

[csquared]

If you want to have some fun, try QEMU. It does machine emulation. Try running a Sparc64, Power PC or MIPS.

[Amadan]

Virtualisation is great, it cuts down on costs to run "servers" by consolidation. I run 2 VM machines to replace a number of raspberry pies and small servers,

A "low" powered machine which runs 24/7 running windows server 2016 with runs a number of hyper-v VMs to handle the "servers" on the network eg,
DNS (piehole)
PXE Boot on LAN
CCTV (Motioneye)
NAS (Nas4Free)
Windows 10 VM

A "heavy" (in home sense) machine with lots of ram and cpu with windows server 2012rc to run virtualbox to virtualised lots of Linux VMs for playing with clustering, SAN etc for learning skills related to work.

I'd love to get my hands on a recent Sparc box like a T5-2 to mess about with but they're still way too pricy. If you're interested in virtualisation the next step is docker