How to best do VM's with current hardware?

ATM I’m in the middle of a complete network shakedown and I’m starting to go over everything X need to be doing. One such thing is set up a vm server.

At the moment I have a maxed out mac pro 3,1 sitting around doing nothing. My first thought was network video machine, but I thought that the 8 cores and 64gb of ram could do other stuff too.

My current idea was to use parallels and have a macbook remoted in over the network. I literally have 5 spare macs so fuck it. But is there something better on linux? I’ve never actually set up qemu or kvm or anything so idk.

The machine shill has to do final cut os stuff at the end of the day though, so one way or another osx needs to be on there.

Could I install qubes and vnc in? idk

Help!

thatks

Qemu + KVM is the best. But all of the good tools for management are on Linux afaik.

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As a long time mac user with a couple of MacPro 3,1 sitting about I’ve got a little experience… I’ve since upgraded to an AMD system that uses less power at the wall, but the idea should be the same since MacPro can run linux with bootcamp and those dual xeons should work great.

I use Unraid for its great GUI and community but you could roll your own Linux Qemu + KVM flavor if you want.

I’m currently running it primarily as a semi-automated video encoding system with several dockers and watch folders, Plex media server etc. I also have a Linux, Windows and MacOS VMs all running simultaneously if needed with GPU pass through.

As someone who has built a few Hackintosh systems, I’ve actually found that setting up a MacVM to be even easier (especially on AMD hardware) than on the bare metal itself. I highly recommend it if you need to still run MacOS alongside of other VMs.

Look for Spaceinvader One’s tutorials on YT if you want to see how to set this up on Unraid. He makes it very straight forward.

Edit:

One thing, you might even be able to upgrade to High Sierra even though its not supported on your hardware. You won’t be able to install Mojave however because your CPU’s lack SSE 4.2 which is required.

Actually I have installed and ran the 10.14 preview on it before, you just have to break metal and tell it to guck off.

I’m still leaning on the osx + parallels + remoting, at least for now. I know I won’t break anything that way :3

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