Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance

Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with... by Cyph0n on Sunday July 18, 2021 @05:06AM (#27871642)

Same setup here! I am running Proxmox on the host to streamline managing VMs and storage. Proxmox comes with a nice web GUI, which makes it very east to monitor system state.

I have a Windows VM for gaming that owns the single Nvidia GPU. I also have a few Linux VMs for development (via VS Code remote) and media management.

As far as storage goes, I don’t have anything too fancy. Proxmox is installed on an SSD. I have a second SSD for VM images. For all other storage (media, photos, VM image backups, etc.), I have a 3 disk ZFS pool consisting of a single RAID-Z1 vdev - yea, it’s risky, but losing the pool wouldn’t be the end of the world.

One of the cool things about this kind of setup is being able to easily restore VMs from backup. Some time back, I accidentally screwed up my Windows install by enabling Hyper-V (nested virt). I panicked at first, but then remembered that I have daily snapshots of the VM. I had it back up and running within 10 minutes :)

All in all, it was fun to setup and has been running very smoothly.

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Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with... by j1elo on Sunday July 18, 2021 @08:22AM (#27872323)

Would you mind talking a bit about the small decisions you took for a Proxmox setup? I am slowly learning and planning my (very)small server setup. Things like:

* Are the VM image backups you mentioned, done to your pool by means of the ZFS snapshots? Or done at the file-level with rsync or similar.

* Do you make backups of the Proxmox installation? Similar as before: is Proxmox itself on a ZFS volume, so backups can be done just by doing ZFS snapshots? The installer lets me choose between an LVM-Thin + ext4, or a ZFS filesystem, and I was wondering whether to choose one or the other, for maximum convenience.

* "Proxmox is installed on an SSD": isn't that a bit wasteful? I mean, doesn't the Proxmox system just take like 1 or 2 GB at most?

I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre m910q which brings a 160GB M.2 NVMe disk, and another 320GB SSD disk... so I an in the process of deciding where to put each thing. Although for bigger storage I'm also considering if adding a 1 or 2 TB USB3 external disk would make sense (to store user backups like photos, documents, and also for the server's system backups)

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Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with... by Cyph0n on Sunday July 18, 2021 @05:52PM (#27877017)

1. In my case, VM image SSDs are formatted using LVM-Thin. Based on this, Proxmox automatically takes care of snapshotting the VM images for backups. It would work the same if you used ZFS for image storage.

2. No, I do not currently backup the Proxmox config. There is a good script here: https://github.com/DerDanilo/proxmox-stuff

3. If you install Proxmox on a "thin" filesystem (ZFS or LVM-Thin), then yes, you will get snapshot functionality for free. Note that you would have to configure this yourself - Proxmox does not expose a backup feature for its own config.

4. I have two NVMe SSDs. The first is 500GB and is split into two partitions: 100GB for the Proxmox install (LVM + ext4), and 400GB for VM images and containers (LVM-Thin). The second is 900GB and is fully used for VM images. Both are using LVM.

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Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with... by j1elo on Sunday July 18, 2021 @06:19PM (#27877196)

Seeing how others have organized their systems helps me with doing my own thing. Thanks a lot for sharing!

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Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with... by zaptheimpaler on Sunday July 18, 2021 @05:19AM (#27871674)

Yes I love that an entire VM is basically 2 files - one disk image, one libvirt config. Makes backup and restore so easy :)

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