H Al,
thx for responding -
tried myself to get firmer grasp on the moving parts of tech and between own ears.
>I have used VirtualBox (on Windows) and Hyper-V.
I used Virtualbox a lot with Linux and XP clients, as it allowed me to copy whole VM where needed.
Case in point: Mailbox is now 22GB due to some idiots now not only sending PDF mostly from JPG,
but also some video stuff.
Backing all those separate mail folders up into single rar/7zip takes a lot of time -
it is easier to copy the .vdi *including* core linux plus Thunderbird (+1,3GB)
as that creates backup for/on every machine (I retrieve every 10 weeks, in between stays on server)
As Linux needs no registration / key, one practice I want to keep under Hyper-V
>It sounds like you want to:
>- Minimize multi-boot; limit it to only where absolutely required.
Yupp. Multi boot practice started under W2K, as the "difficult" setup back then
(IDE + 1 or 2 SCSI controllers, 4-6 HD each 1 to 4GB sometimes exchanged between machines)
often corrupted even pure multiboot Windows machines, requiring Knoppix repair from DVD.
Nowadays Windows itslf is stable enough - booting from USB is still a repair/data salvage option.
One of the reasons I probably will opt for NTFS as Hyper-V base - PE + Linux handle it.
Older big Iron and new laptop have nice dedicated nVidia graphic cards,
offspring option wants to game there with nothing wrapping the hardware.
So on those machines a separate current bare metal Windows besides Hyper-V is planned.
(perhaps only via booting identical .vhdx without Hyper-V beneath it - dunno my options yet)
> This may require some P2V conversion of existing OS instances running on bare metal
Of course they will be copied to laarge USB in advance, but I guess I'll try to start fresh.
There is only 1 "heavy" Windows install left, which is Win7 and most of the time airgapped.
Most of the programs I use are xCopy installs, others have .Msi/installer on USB.
Plan is to have Linux accessing the Internet and spin up Windows machines with
internet access only when unavoidable (read: tax software or update check)
Previous usage was to have VMs nearly preconfigured and copy from those .vhd -
worked for Linux, XP and Win10.
XP mostly to have a secure vfp+office97 environment, no LAN-card, so always safe to use ;-)
>- Consolidate VMs on to a more manageable platform. This may be less painful than you might think; some hypervisors can export VMs to a portable format, or convert or even directly run those created by other hypervisors
Most of the time I work from Antix17, as this was long term stable and I resolved WINE years back.
Was a PITA back then, new tests with Zorin and Antix 22 were a breeze compared.
One of the things I plan to resume is to play with newer versions/distributions of Linux.
Long term plan is to relegate Windows to those apps where I need guarantees of correctness:
Tax software, probably newer versions of Excel.
>- Option: consider using containers rather than VMs, especially if you have multiple VMs that are based on a single OS such as a preferred Linux distro
That might come as 2nd step, if the old HW is still used regularly -
one of the things I like that even with current setup I often travel just with USB disk
[current Tunderbird VM, special VHDs with documents, current "data" to analyze with XP or Antix+Wine]
which is easy carry if I spare myself looking for parking space by taking 2 wheels only.
>To get started you might want to get at least one new machine to be a new home for VMs and/or containers, or convert an existing machine for that use. For new machines there are many options such as:
>- Low power appliances such as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7U4fCj_Pos . Despite their modest processors and low TDP/passive cooling, people are running hypervisors and VMs on them
>- Power-efficient servers such as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cN-bFZMysE (video a bit dated but shows the idea)
That "firewall" is a nice current "brick" - were the first ones 80386SX or 80486SX ?
AFAIR it was the "halfed" 80386SX, but looong time ago...
The main thing nagging is only 2 RAM slots on board of the Ryzen Firewall ;-)
I have no SAN: paranoid me rotates external USB3 for backup purposes.
Too lazy (read stingy) for swapping JBOD drives of separate box:
My main in-house net is airgapped and has no WLAN - SMB safe enough there.
Internet access for tablets and some Linux laptops only.
>I'm not sure I would use Hyper-V for anything other than a homogeneous, all-Windows environment or for one that doesn't want to support a hypervisor other than Hyper-V. For heterogeneous environments that aren't afraid of open-source, my feeling is FOSS alternatives are more robust and mature. VMWare being bought by Broadcom has raised some concerns about its ongoing suitability for the SMB market.
You may be right - Virtualbox as Hypervisor was rock solid under Linux and Windows -
but ate lots of processing power. This is still fallback plan if all Level2 Hypervisors fall through.
My main reason to start with Hyper-V is the option to analyze a borked disk on another machine.
>Two currently popular FOSS environments for homelabs and SMB are Proxmox and XCP-ng (based on Xen, which was formerly used by AWS). One place to start looking at them is
https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/xcp-ng-vs-proxmox-2022/14200 . Tom concentrates on XCP-ng but he also has links there to a leading Proxmox proponent.
Thx - Will be tried if the current attempt fails...
>With products like this you can start thinking about:
>- Clustering of multiple VM hosts, and migrating VMs amongst them as needed (even live migration in some cases!)
>- High availability/failover
>- Enterprise-grade features such as ZFS and software RAID (ZFS is now the default filesystem on Netgate appliances)
sounds great, but for my use case and paranoia I plan for "sneaker USB" at the moment.
>I consider support a critical factor:
>- Will a hypervisor
arbitrarily go EOL (like Microsoft)?
Yupp, this is my main worry. Still, as OS surface is smaller, less code to worry about.
>- Is there good community support?
>- Is is possible to purchase service/support if needed or wanted?
see above: read the NTFS which does not boot in intended machine is main line of defense
after several generations of external USB disks,.
after trying to read versioning in Nextcloud or Source Control.
Will play with 1 of the laptops soon - probably an older one to try to pass inbuilt nVidia,
to measure there and to keep new Ryzen/nVidia laptop gameable until stable solution is found.
One never knows when offspring wants to go skiing again
(last time cought Omikron there, was glad to have brought gameable i7 laptop...)
thx & regads
thomas
