Hi guys, I’m in the process of ordering parts for my build. I plan on installing a triple booting environment - Windows, Linux and Proxmox Backup Server, each one in RAID 1 on identical 4TB SSDs. Question is… well, two problems:
1.) When installing the OSs, there’s no serial number visibility during the OS installers so it’s really hard to tell which drives need selecting. The simplest solution I’ve come up with is to simply pull the drives out that I don’t want used for a given install i.e. have only 2 drives in at any given time, so there’s no confusion. Is this the best way of going about this? Or is there something else I’m overlooking? On my current computer, I have dual boot with some old SSDs and an NVMe, so it’s really easy to tell which drives are being chosen.
2.) What would be the best way to go about booting? Will the drives always pop up in the same order, so I can just select the ones from memory? Or is this a GRUB problem? I’ve never really used GRUB so I don’t really know if it can help here?
Look up what a type 1 hypervisor is. This is what you want. The Hypervisor basically assigns cores, memory blocks and PCIe devices as required and then pretty much stay in the background to let the guest OSes do their thing.
If you want to learn more on this topic, check out Xen:
I have thought about using Proxmox for this in the past, but I either didn’t research this any further past coming up with the idea or I forgot what I found out. Time to research this ?again?. Last I looked at it was almost a year ago.
No need. You can just use Linux or Windows as a host and run VMs there. My Proxmox Backup server is a VM on my Workstation along with several other VMs for my desktop use.
Install libvirtd (and virt-manager) and off you go. QEMU/KVM makes the world go round.
Then install your favourite Linux distribution, install virt-manager and create a Windows and a PBS VM. Optional write two systemd services to start them headless and use VNC or Looking Glas for the Windows VM.
BTW. You can also use LXC instead of a VM for PBS if you want a smaller foot print or even install it bare metal on Debian.
Same here. I do have proper servers running Proxmox though. But for performance and locality (and to have a separate machine and storage location for PBS) reasons, I run this stuff on my workstation. You don’t want network latency for your desktop stuff, like Photoshop or graphically accelerated stuff.
Benefit of a VM is that you can move it very quickly to other machines later if things change. PBS is just a (qcow,raw) )file you can copy and run wherever. If I manage to get my new server running, I may just copy the VM over and use it running Proxmox there.
Dual-Boot, Triple-Boot…that’s 90s stuff in my books. Tedious and you’re always to lazy to reboot and end up sticking to one OS and the other is rarely used. And if you can run PBS all the time and not just when you boot into it (and can’t use win or Linux while doing so), that’s just so much more convenient.
Dual-Boot is for nostalgia nerds and people who don’t know how virtualization developed in the last decade.
A VM is just another app running in the fore- or background. With today’s memory capacities, a dozen VMs is no problem for a desktop PC. I built and ran a 6-node Ceph test cluster on my Laptop alongside 2 client machines (1x Win, 1x Linux)…it’s fine, just needs memory. Memory is life.
Exactly, I have no problem virtualising PBS, I do have a problem virtualising Windows. I don’t want to buy a second video card and I need native performance. This is the problem.