So I am looking for a way to use other OSes from my Linux laptop, anywhere I am. The abilities must be as follows. Ability to Wake on Lan (PC does support this). Connect directly to my OS of choice that are pre-built in VMs (OSX, Windows, Linux) Connect from Linux from anywhere. Encrypted if possible.
Is this possible? I want it so I can do Programming on OSX, Other things on Windows and deal with it all from my Linux box. Reason I am doing this is because the VMs I attempted to setup the other week drawing a ton of power when on battery which is to be expected, I felt this maybe a more friendly option for my battery life.
Are you using KVM/QEMU? If you are you can use virt-manager to access your VMs remotely. It connects over SSH so as long as you have an SSH server set up it ill work.
I havent decided on the software yet, for the desktop I am tempted to run Windows, maybe Windows server as I get it free from Uni. I also do not have an SSH server, I need the graphical desktop as well for OSX.
The problem with this is I cant use OSX natively on my desktop, hence the need for VMs, and as far as I know remote clients have issus when showing graphics. although I wont be gaming I may do some photo editing on it.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to do. You want to run the VMs on a server and view them remotely, but you don't want to use a remote desktop thing like vnc or team viewer? Can't be done.
No using VNC is fine, but I want a direct remote into VMWare, there is a way to setup VMWare so your VNC logs straight into the VM. Just need to figure out power up, may use team viewer for that though.
I'm going to stick by my suggestion of using kvm/qemu with virt-manager. It does exactly what you describe and it's encrypted because it uses ssh to connect the client to the sever (that doesn't mean you have to use the command line, virt-manager is a gui)
This is virt-manager, I am connected to two different servers and can access all the VMs running on them. I can start, stop and restart them or make new ones.
I can open the VMs and have access to them as if I was running them locally.
Alternatively you could use proxmox and connect to it via it's webui.
No, I'm saying that virt-manager connects to the server using SSH. So aslong as the machine hosting the VMs has an SSH server configured you can connect virt-manager to it using your SSH credentials and access the VMs with it.
Yeah, well I responded prematurely before completely reading through. So basically your explaining to use a ssh encrypted tunnel to connect to the server, then using virt-manager as the remote web gui?
It's not a web gui, it's a program which is used as a gui to configure libvirt. You can use it locally or remotely. It connects to the server using SSH (there are other methods also but SSH is easy), you don't need to configure a tunnel or anything first, just tell virt-manager to use SSH in the new connection page when connecting to the server.
Ok, I totally get it now, that makes sense now. For some reason the way you where explaining made me think that you were explaining a ssh tunnel, and using a textual based gui.
If I'm using ESXi on my home network and am on travel with a windows laptop, would be simplest thing to do is enable VPN in my router, VPN in, then use vSphere client as if I were home?
Linux as a type1 or even type2 keeps looking better and better...
