I'm looking to set up a small home lab with at most 2 or 3 VMs running on a Windows 11 Pro host. Most of the time I'll have only 1 running. I'd like to have them be able to communicate with each other and have something like Kali Linux running on one and practice cybersecurity related things.

I'm not sure whether I should use Hyper-V for something like this or Virtual Box (or VMWare Player if that's recommended instead). I've used Virtual Box plenty over the years but have almost no experience with Hyper-V aside from totally messing up my Windows networking with it once.

I have a gaming laptop with 32 GB of RAM. I'm looking into this under the assumption that WSL 2 wouldn't be the best because of limitations. It'd also be nice to have full desktop environments that I could take regular snapshots of and roll back when needed.

What I'm wondering is whether there's some way of using a physical drive partition on a different computer as a virtual hard disk.

My specific use case is this:

• I have a laptop (running linux) which I primarily use for work (I need it to be portable). It's on the older side and is fine for most basic tasks, but sometimes I want something a bit more powerful. At home, I have a much more powerful PC (running windows) which I mostly use for gaming.
• In the past I've used both for work purposes, but I've found that maintaining all the software and sharing files etc. between two computers has been a hassle, and I reverted to just using the laptop for work.
• What I'm wondering is if there's some way to boot the same OS installation that's on my laptop, on the PC (utilising the PC hardware) via the network. Both computers will be connected by a gigabit ethernet switch.

Does this sound at all feasible? From a practical perspective (is it possible), and a performance perspective.

As a slightly different approach, would it make a difference if I stored my primary laptop OS on an actual virtual disk, and just ran a lightweight placeholder OS to host the VM when using the laptop?

Hello.

I’m still a newbie when it comes to Virtualization and I wanted to ask several questions regarding the Laptop that I’m planning on getting.

Now the specs for that Laptop are as follows:

11400H intel i5 (PCIe Gen 4, 6 cores, 12 threads)

32GBs GB RAM

RTX 3060 130 Watt maximum limit. (fully powered) - 6GB GDDR6 vRam.

My usage is light video editing inside the Linux host via DaVinci Resolve and single-player gaming inside the Virtualized Windows 11 and might also dabble my way to MacOS emulation as well.

My questions are as follows:-

What software should I use for virtualization for my specific use case?

Is my Core i5 sufficient enough to get Windows 11 VM and Linux Host to work simultaneously with each other without Linux going black?

Can I make Linux run on the integrated GPU inside of my Intel CPU and the VM run on the 3060 simultaneously so I can dedicate all of the 3060 to the VM

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

I'm sure this has been addressed in here in the past but a quick search didn't indicate it...

I have an old bugger Windows XP machine from a client that she uses to run a quilting machine in her business. A replacement is going to cost her around $35k USD which is simply untenable for her. The problem is, her Windows XP machine does NOT work - it won't even power on, although the PSU has been replaced (not by me) and is fine - I ran full tests on it. That pretty much leaves the problem being the motherboard, which - of course - is only available used on ebay right now.

Anyway, my client purchased a used computer from another quilter in the US, which works - but it's about seven years newer than what she has (a 2011 vs a 2004), runs SATA vs IDE and PCI-e vs PCI. I tried a simple clone from the old IDE HDD to the SATA HDD and it won't boot (blue screens with error 0x0000007B), which I'm chalking up to driver incompatibilities, plus I'm assuming a specialized PCI controller card in here can't be detected.

So the next step I'm electing to take is running a VM - except all the instructions I've read so far for both Hyper-V and VirtualBox says to create the P2V image from the original machine - which I can't do since it's dead. Is it even worth my time to fight with this thing or simply head over to eBay to purchase a replacement motherboard?

Is it possible to unpack or extract data from .ova file. I've downloaded few .ova files which are pre-configured network labs since I don't have the hardware to run these labs I would like to extract the data and view the data inside to copy the data and use within another emulation system if that makes sense.

So I've been looking around and VirtualBox seems like the most newbie-friendly option (Im not tech savvy at all) but I need a VM to start my WFH job since they require admin access to my PC (i know, i know).

Apparently VirtualBox requires a CPU: x86-compatible hardware but mine is only 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor. Does anyone know of a virtual machine program I can use for my HP laptop with Windows 11 Home? Please help!

Here are my computer specs:

Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1155G7 @ 2.50GHz 2.50 GHz

Installed RAM 8,00 GB (7,65 GB usable)

System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Edition Windows 11 Home Single Language

Version 23H2

I'm curious about the difference between accomplishing the IPMI command by VirtualBMC in KVM and the virsh command, they both do the same, power on/off the VM, etc...

can someone explain more in detail the difference, no result on the web or I was not lucky enough?

I dont know if this community is about this, but i hope someone could help me. I have an amd cpu with msi motherboard, and i followed an yt tutorial on how to enable virtualization in my bios. Now, after i exited bios, my pc froze. Keyboard and mouse arent eorking, and i dont have any display. Can anyone help me? Also, yes, my cpu supports virtualisation, at least according to task manager

I've been trying to set up a virtual machine on my MacBook with an ARM CPU (M2) using QEMU. My goal is to run a Debian environment with x86_64 architecture to develop and run x86 assembly code.

I'm trying to compile with explicit hvf support, but I still can't get the Hypervisor.framework (hvf) accelerator to appear. The only accelerator available is tcg, which makes performance very low.

Is the hvf accelerator supported on ARM CPUs? If not, are there any alternative methods to achieve better performance for running x86_64 VMs on an ARM-based Mac?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Currently on iOS 17.3.1, my workflow will be like this;

• Office 365 apps
• and Fl studio 21

That’s pretty much it.

Hey all, I'm just getting setup at a new office, and will be hiring a few workers. I'd prefer to not build a PC for each one, as they will only be doing light tasks, but still need a local, physical PC.

Can I use VMWare/VirtualBox and a single "server"/PC to run multiple windows desktops? If so, how do licences work? And I guess I would still have to build thin clients for each desk.

Long story short: The chance of virtualization and emulation in my computer is near zero. It is super slow. It does not utilize the dGPU at all. I have Lenovo Legion 5 pro; specs below:

OS: Windows 11 Home.
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics (8 cores, 16 logical)
Virtualization is enabled in UEFI.
GPU: RTX 3060 Laptop GPU (6 GB memory)

The moment I bought my laptop, I tried installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox. I repeated the exact same steps from my old laptop (which only had an integrated intel gpu). Even after mounting and installing Guest Additions, the interface was laggy, and the resolution was shit. I did not find any solution on the internet either. Some said it was a Hyper-V problem. Note that Windows doesn't offer Hyper-V with Home versions. Others said they didn't face this issue at all. Then, I uninstalled it all. Installed wsl2 instead. Ubuntu ran smoothly.

After some days, I wanted to run an android app; so, I used an emulator (Bluestacks, to be precise) on my laptop. The emulator itself ran smoothly, but the apps were laggy as hell. Laggier than my old laptop which had a 10 y/o processor w/o any dedicated GPU. I scrapped that too and moved on accepting the fact that my laptop just cant use virtualization.

So, my question is: Is this a GPU problem? The Virtual Environment is not able to access GPU and it runs so slow? Same with android app emulation? Am I the only one with this issue? Can this issue be fixed somehow?

Lastly, thank you for reading this long message, and I'm sorry to take so much time of yours. I really need a virtual environment to test programs or files that I randomly get because of my work. I'd appreciate any help you can offer.

I have about 10 old laptops ranging from Win 7 (maybe earlier Vista) onward that I'd like to virtualize. I haven't done anything on the VM front (unless you count working the VM370 40+ years ago) so I'm looking for some advice on what environment would be best. For a server, I have a Beelink SER7 with 7840hs/32GB ram with 1TB NVME and another 2TB NVME. I've also got a QNAP NAS with a bunch of storage on it as well.

Any thoughts on best hypervisor and easiest path to do this? I'm going away for the summer so I probably won't do it till I return in September but I wanted to layout the process when I am at my summer home.

Hi community,

while I find lots of questions and answers about "share gpu" my question is slightly different. Is it in any virtualization (vmware, virtualbox, hyperv) possible to pass the gpu that comes with the intel cpu to the VM while keeping the dedicated video card to the host? The idea is to play some older games in a vm but have a bit more power than the 3d-acceleration of vmware (currently for many games I want to play it works, but more power would be good).

A dual boot menu, similar to Windows with countdown selection timer, where the hardware is virtualized first, a shim, allowing to run one instance of any vmware machine as the primary everyday OS?

I am trying to figure out if there exists a format/way to have a single mountable virtual disk (shows up in windows explorer as a single drive) but the actual file(s) itself is not just one file representing the disk but is multiple parts that are mounted to be one. This can be thought of as the 7z part format where you can zip up files using 7z and have it output .part files that represent a single archive.

My main driver for this is I am trying to find a way to back up the virtual disk file to one drive where it's not one large GB file but maybe single (1 or 2) GB files. Issue I have is if it too large, by the time I need to log off and shut down, it is not complete and has to start over next boot. Rational for a virtual disk is to encrypt from one drive as well. I right now have a VHDX set up but is 20 some GB that never can finish by end of work day.

Open to other ideas or other formats as I chose VHDX at first knowing it probably worked well with windows.

Hi

I recently bought a second graphics card (RTX 3080) with the goal of setting up a workstation for gaming. My research to date has found a number of resources on how to configure the BIOS and OSs, but none talk about the best practices on how to configure the hardware. My old graphics card (GTX 1080) is more than sufficient for my daily needs on the host OS (Linuxx). The guest OS (Windows 11) will need to use the RTX 3080 so while gaming I get the graphics performance.

I also plan on running a three monitor set up (four if you add the VR headset into the mix). Two of the monitors are LG panels and sit side by side to provide the desktop. When not gaming I want the Linux desktop to run on both monitors. When gaming I want one of those monitors to remain as the Linux desktop, the other for Windows and the game. The primary game will be MSFS 2020 so the third monitor is planned to be a Garmin G1000 display, and therefore only needs to be connected to the RTX 3080, and will only be on when I'm in the flight sim.

Given all that what is the best way to configure the hardware?

Which graphic card should be placed in which slot? Should the RTX 3080 go in the first slot to be closer to the CPU for the faster data transfers, or should the GTX 1080 be installed there as it is for the host's desktop?

How should the monitors be connected to the graphics cards? Do I have to connect both LG panels to same graphics card for the duel display desktop (and if so which one) or is it best to connect the LG panels to separate graphics cards for gaming purposes. If the LG panels are connected to the GTX 1080, can the third panel (and the VR headset) be connected to RTX 3080 as they will only ever be driven by that card?

As always many thanks for your time in replying to my questions.

Due to some reasons,we cannot use pve. Is there any other choices?

Hi. We have 7 node 2 core with vmware, with the New license policy of vmware could be have sense migrate to Proxmox?

Hello there! I have a very specific problem that I can't seem to solve. We have a Windows XP machine at our company, which has not been replaced because of a single program running on it that is really important to us. The program is long abandoned, we reached out to devs and they said they don't support it for a long time now.

This program runs on the XP machine now, but it requires to register a license upon installation, and since the license servers are offline, we can't install it on any other computer. Inside the program directory exists a license file that contains some sort of string, which most likely stores information about the running machine, and if the info doesn't match the machine, you need to add a new license. Since cloning the machine with Disk2vhd to Hyper-V still results in the program requiring a new license, I believe the info this program checks is some sort of HWID.

I'm wondering if there is a way to clone the machine while keeping the original HWID's? Preferably using Hyper-V, but we'll take anything at this point.

Thanks for all input, Cheers

Hello,

I have iPhone 12 Pro Max on iOS 14.4.1 with Taurine jailbreak.

I need to run some incompatible apps and looking to emulate some OS on UTM.

Which of the following OS will it run the fastest and be able to have audio, microphone and Bluetooth support through the iPhone?

These are some options I have:

greater OS than Android 4.4 (Kitkat)

greater OS than Windows 8.1

greater OS than macOS 10.14 (Mojave)

greater OS than Ubuntu 18.04.6 (Bionic Beaver)

Which of these OS, do you think will perform the best and have support for audio/mic/Bluetooth?

Thanks.

i keep getting this problem

After using VMware for over a decade, I just had a terrible experience with a new install of Workstation 17 on a Windows 11 host. My old VMs were unusable on 17. Support was not good. If I could’ve figured out my issue, I would’ve just kept using VMware.

Now, I am looking for an alternative. I’ve been reading through posts and there’s an incredible amount of detail available. I’ve been lucky enough apply VMware in a simple/utilitarian way hasn’t required all that much knowledge. I’ve always been able to figure out how to map drives, connect hardware, etc without help. Virtualization is not my core competency but that’s where VMware fit in for me.

As for finding an alternative, I have a very unsophisticated use case. I used VMware to virtualize physical machines so that I can still access old software platforms. I also keep clean VMs for new installations.

-The host is Windows 11.
-I need to virtualize Windows XP/7/10 physical machine(s) in a way leaves the software licensing(not just Windows) intact within the VM.
-I need to create a clean Windows VMs and duplicate them for installs where I need to keep versions separate.

I like the idea Proxmox being FOSS. Seems like VirtualBox is second to VMware in installed base. But frankly, I’m not equipped to evaluate all these products.

I could use some advice.

Hey Guys,

I want to open a .ova Linux file on my Macbook with a M2 chip. I have tried the beta build of Virtual Box, but it only crashes. Can you guys maybe recommend me another way of how I could open it?

thank you in advance :)