I'm looking for a free virtual machine OS to run on my server so I can mess around with a load of differnt OSs. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who said there was a good one that wasn't VMware, and he said it came with a load of old windows ISOs but he couldn't remember its name. Anyone know which he was talking about? Or anyone know of something that would fill the job?
Cheers
Ed
P.S. If the software I walking about used pirated ISOs just say, I'm not interested in pirate stuff.
people keep suggesting unraid to me
Thanks for the suggestion. unRAID does look nice, however it only has a limited free trial. I am hoping for something that is 'Free as in speech' or at least 'Free as in beer'.
What I'm looking for might just not exist. But thanks for the suggestion.
Ed
i think the basic kit is like 20$
it seems to me like that might MIGHT be the easiest solution with out hella hastle
https://lime-technology.com/buy-it/
Unless they have a more basic version than listed here it is currently $59
yea looks like it is 60 bucks hm
i do however think its complete bullshit the only differences in price is how many hard drives i can have plugged in
thats stupid as hell
Yeah, it seems fairly arbitrary. But at for what the software is the basic price is pretty good. I guess they had to give some reason to not buy the cheapest package.
The problem for me is I probably won't use most of the features and I can't really reationalise that kind of spend for what I will be using it for. I might just end up running a pretty basic linux OS then just putting VM software on that. I was justy wondering if people knew of a more eligant way that was still free.
Ed
Get proxmox. It's free as in beer for a few parts and the rest is free as in speech. I use it for my servers.
I think Wendell did a couple videos about it a while back.
Thanks, I don't think I've come across that one before. It looks promising from a 10 second look at their site. i will give it a good look and probably try it out.
Cheers!
Ed
The install is really easy, and if you're familiar with Linux file systems, then a benefit you'll like is that it supports zfs
Nice, i've messed around with ZFS in FreeNAS. I've not a huge amount of experiance with linux but thats what I will be using the server to learn about anyway for the most part. I presume proxmox works as the OS, is it based off something like FreeBDS or unix? It doesn't matter if you don't know, purely my curiosity.
Ed
Proxmox is Debian based and yeah, it does operate as the os. It's got a steep but quick learning curve, to the uninitiated. Spend a few minutes playing around with everything and you'll be set.
This system shouldn't require any major command line usage unless you want to use it in a cluster of multiple physical machines.
Ah, cheers. It would seem that I will be dealing with my load server fans more and more now, a mixed blessing perhaps! All I need now is to find a hole to hide my load as all hell server in so I can actually sleep while its running.
Ed
I'm building a server cabinet with sound damping foam to keep it quiet. I'm going to post a thread in a day or two when I get the rails to mount my server.
Also, Proxmox. That's what I'm using.
Also, it's loud not load.
Dependant on your usecase, virtualbox running on lets say ubuntu server, really runs nice.
At my old workplace we ran into the server drowning(it was an actual operational dev server running devops while dedicating the remaining cores to infrastructure VMs) it did drown though at around 15-20 VMs albeit xeon(an old version) and all that fancy hardware.
But if you need windows VMs though you do need licenses and so on, doubt MS allows any kind of distros regardless of the nature to distribute valuable licenses for their OSes, properly you can find the ISO's for free, it's the license to use it which costs, im guessing even the MSDOS cow is being milked of all it's worth(imagine that dried up cartoony dusty cow on a milk farm).
Pretty much all the services M$ offers now a days can replaced with a linux service of sorts, and the size of your vm(s) would drastically decrease since linux really is ALOT more VM friendly, to the point where virtualbox even has driver support in the ubuntu repos.
My suggestion if you're looking for a free VM environment, is grab a ubuntu server, slap some VBox on it, and get used to running Linux VMs. Windows licenses are hella expensive, and inefficient for what you need VMs to do.
But he is clearly just looking for a hole to put his load in.
Right?
Well after the
thread.
would it be easier to passthrough a gpu on that ?
cos all im really looking for is the ability to make a ramdisk
and tell a virtual copy of windows that the ramdisk is its boot drive
and run windows as my daily driver but inside teh ram of a vm
for the purposes of gaming and every-man tasks
for teh security that i can snapshot my install of the vm
and if something strange happens
just magically shut down the vm
and reload the snapshot from last nite before the driver update bricked it
or windows decided to force an update or
the virus wrecked the install
ect ect
Virtualbox is awesome. I haven't tried PCIe pass-through on it though.
My experience is you can't, don't hold me on it though, virtualization is a large grand world with lots of crooks and crannies where it may be done, once i get the time i still need to look into XEN/ZEN? what ever it's called and LXD? i believe it is called, both VERY different techs, where LXD sounds retardedly promising if the specs ive read sofar are true and it can handle kernel passthrough and so on(Again im properly wrong here, little research done at all, except talking to a mate and his experiences, so these are all just facts pulled out my arse, been busy taking care of a dying grandpaa, and sick grandmaa for the last few months).
VBox however is more or less created to be user friendly(and hense dumbed down to the very core of emulating hard/software) and not to mention the snapshot feature which is just wow, wow, wow, ill just throw in an extra wow(for development this feature is just godly). But hardware and so on is not really the thing they focus on, but rather emulation of hardware(albeit you can passthrough USB devices), and it does this extremely well.