We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas

[stephdl (Stéphane de Labrusse)]

@medworthy

32 GB of RAM and 8 cores (what speed are they running at?) seems a bit of an overkill for a server (unless you are running it within a datacentre environment!), but seeing that you are using your server like a workstation with a desktop environment / X installed, I can understand the need for the high specifications. Does your bios / cpu support hardware virtualization (either VT-d or IOMMU support)?

produit: AMD FX™-8320 Eight-Core Processor
capacité: 3500MHz
configuration: cores=8 enabled cores=8 threads=8
virtualisation instruction : amd-v
size: 7980MiB

MB
produit: 970A-UD3
fabriquant: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.

All the time I have 4 virtualbox running machines on a debian 7 wheezy

• SME Server
• Centos6 Build Server
• debian 7 local repositories for development (debian, centos, epel, smeserver, nethserver, mirror.de-labrusse.fr)
• debian 7 for Jdownloader

After that I need to have more machines running for development, at least one by bug/feature tested or fixed and often I can play with 10 Machines or sometime more…ok you can pause a machine and start another one

before that I had an AMD Athlon™ II X4 640 Processor but it was sometime too slow. In fact I don’t have time to waste and I don’t like to wait, therefore I have chosen a powerful (and not expensive) processor.

Actually the X server doesn’t waste time processor when I watch movies mainly because I use VDPAU with a little nvida card (less 30€).

produit: GT218 [GeForce 210]
fabriquant: NVIDIA Corporation

With that processor and the amount of ram, I have a nice sand box. Most of time I use virtualbox by ssh with an export display, but I have also phpvirtualbox if I need to manage quickly virtual machine or across the local network.

[medworthy (Mark Edworthy)]

@stephdl, sounds like a healthy set of specifications (I just visited Gigabyte website and had a look at the board details - looks nice!)

[medworthy (Mark Edworthy)]

Just had a thought, if you are running Windows/Linux as a desktop/workstation then maybe it would make more sense to have a duel boot workstation (using grub to select between the two OS)

[JOduMonT (Jonathan Dumont)]

I know it’s a old topic but

I have a concret exemple for @medworthy about if swap is usefull inside a VM

I had a VM was running in & out of memory and because of that was refusing mail from time to time. With SWAP I resolve the issue.

@PParker VirtualBox is nice; use it a lot inside of OpenMediaVault; but you can’t nested, which means doing VM under VM. As an example you can’t make a KVM Host inside a VirtualBox.

Voilà my two cents.

[stephdl (Stéphane de Labrusse)]

I personally switched from virtualbox to proxmox since I reinstalled my server. At first I could think that proxmox is better than VB, but if you look deeply, VB gets some better options like when you clone a VM it is a full clone (mac address is not changed), with proxmox it is not possible, so I use snapshot to go back at the first state. An option could be to make a backup of the VM and restore it, however it needs so LONG time.

The usb catch is better in VB
The wide display of VM is better in VB
…

The killer features of proxmox are all the VM management (HA, monitoring, VM migration).

In short, if you are a developer, and you don’t have the need to keep a VM working a long time, Virtualbox is nice also.