What is the purpose of virtual machines?

What is the purpose of virtual machines?
What do you use them for?

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shitposting by pretending that i use lunix

Posting a loose Comp Sci path that I got recommended.

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to run the many meme linux distros Sup Forums seems to concoct

My Bachelor's thesis is a c++ program that runs on linsux and uses an ms sql database on windows... and i'm on osx.

go figure, retard.

Work and testing.
Knowing how many ressources you need for a given task, it's always more beneficial to buy high powered hardware and virtualize different services than buy a ton of smaller hardware and install everything bare metal.

Testing and dealing with risky files.

Using Linux

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Test out an operating system.
Do risky activity like torrenting sketchy shit while keeping your main system clean.
Run programs you wouldn't normally be able to use on your OS.

Running old operating systems.

How would that show you how many resources you need?
So you're virtualizing services by basically using them online? Is a VM required for that or can't you just use the cloud?

Trying to get a solid understanding of a this in one go rather than having it takes months of learning things here and there.


Could you install to your main system directly from the VM from there, or do you have to retorrent it to your main?

Isolation of workloads and better use of hardware resources. I have an old desktop hosting a controller for my switch and security gateway (ubiquiti), a windows vm for if I can't use linux for something, a monitor for my IP camera setup, a small plex server, a dns server, a network share to dump files to when I re-image a machine, a minecraft server and a torrent machine to spin up and down as needed. Aside from this VMs allow me to test the meme distro I'm looking at without tying up extra hardware.

also, why the fuck are they laggy as fuck? Or is it just VirtualBox that can only utilize 2 cores, 128mb ram and 56mb 3D memory?

Is there another option? I have a fuckign ryzen 6 core.

VMware?

To run TempleOS.

Scalability

My VirtualBox vm uses all 8 cores, and 16gb out of the 32 in my machine. Something's fucked with your system.

You can transfer files easily with a usb stick so you wouldn't have to retorrent it.

My main OS is Linux
My laptop has a Windows XP VM for running car diagnostics stuff
My desktop has a WIndows 8.1 VM for running games with GPU passthrough

I use it so I don't have to install the nigger software my bank requires to access internet banking in my actual OS.

>I have an old desktop hosting a controller for my switch and security gateway
That is fucking cool. Probably needless, but cool.

Could you download a torrent directly from your VM to your main?

I've only used virtualbox to learn bash.

I've been looking at google computeengine because I love that botnet and I think google is cool.

Thank you for a vague as fuck answer

I use VM so I can run Packet Tracker while using my superior Apple laptop. (5 years of daily usage and it's still going strong)

It doesn't show me how many ressources i need, -you- need to know that beforehand. Knowing which programs and services you are going to run, you can make an estimate on what you need. That requires some experience, of course.
Let's take a small office as an example. They'd need something like a central authentication point for other programs (ldap), DNS, DHCP, a Fileserver, throw in a SVN / git as well.
You could install all of that on a single server, but that makes things messy. You'd ideally split up the services across multiple ones. In this fictional example, we have 5 services. Say the big server costs 5k while a small one costs 1k each. At first you don't see a cost benefit, but it saves on electricity and space just to go with the bigger one and virtualize.
Another major advantage is the possibility to create snapshots of the virtualized servers, basically a hard copy of the current state to which you can revert to should an upgrade breakt things.

This is all very simplified, but given a larger company with hundreds of services to run, it makes a whole lot more sense. Speaking from experience, we run three VM clusters at work, consisting of 6 to 8 machines each, running a total of 120 VMs give or take.

Virtualization isn't always the way to go, especially with very I/O or network traffic heavy tasks for example such as high performance databases since the access to the disks and network is shared among all VMs, but it can be a viable solution for different scenarios.

Virtualbox is a typer 2 hypervisor anyways, it fucking sucks. Also, no, those are not the limitations and something is fucked on your end.

Gotchya

Alright, cool. This solidified some of what I already new.

Is AMD-V enabled in your BIOS, and is your VBox configured to use it? And is your VM set up with more than 2 cores?

Work. I need a rather specific dev environment.

Gaming. Host is Linux and GPU passthrough is nice.

Old OS compatibility. Old software that can read old file formats works perfectly in a VM containing the OS it was made for.

Security. A VM can be used to contain sensitive information on a host that isn't fully encrypted, prevent or restrict network access by the system that can see that info, and is generally successful at containing suspected viruses.

Numale soyboys use them as a replacement for jails.

To run TempleOS, of course.

I pull it down to the torrent machine so I can rename things and check the files before pushing media to my other physical plex server/SMB share. Since I have multiple NICs on the host torrenting won't really affect other things talking internally on the network. I pull the file where it needs to be with scp after it's done. Much shorter burst of congestion.

Type 1 sucks even more for desktop use. It makes it a pain to use USB devices and GPU on your host OS.

More versatile ones, that are more separate, more secure, run other OSes, yet have direct exclusive access to any PCIe device you forward to them.

Cool, this is the kind of thing I had in mind when I made this thread.

It's second on the list here
Could definitely qualify me for a job in an IT dept.
Working under a system admin for a while is something I have an interest in.

If all you have is a single machine then yeah, don't run ESXi or whatever directly on the hardware. For that virtualbox is fine. If you run linux then KVM at least makes it somewhat better.

KVM is type 2 though

but muh nested virtualization

VBox can do that too.

To provision CentOS application servers at work.

to test "trial" program installs

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but it doesn't pass the vt-d flags which makes the nested VM run like dogshit. That's been a recurring feature request / issue for years.

Playing video games.

Linux uses my 770, while I pass my 1080 to a Windows VM and use it to play whatever Windows-only games I need to play. It's supricingly efficient as I don't need to fucking restart my machine and lose all my workspaces, access to ZFS drives, open windows, chats and the performance is exactly like bare-metal. Other than games, the occasional Photoshop or Sony Vegas edit, but that's rather rare.

Sometimes I use it to download shady virus-eqsue shit in a disposable snapshotted Windows XP VM. Almost never used, but you never know, nice to have.

for testing shit you dont want to install on your main OS and for testing OSes that you dont want to install on your computer.

I am on linux
my first mostly used virtualmachine was just regular windows to have programs I am used to use without hte need to reboot to win, like office, paint.net goldwave, deezloader, ace player...

it was not just getting shit I could not, but to also keep my linux clean, ace player has AUR package for archlinux but it always created new user and it worked kinda wonky

then as I started to program more I started to test shit in various enviroments and the number of virtual machine grew, testing if deploying shit works as it suppose and going back to snapshots is great
I do more powershell stuff now, aimed at windows, but I had like 5 distros when I did python stuff aimed for linux

and also I added some to have untouched enviroment for single purpose, for example VPN access to one company is in a single VM machine

thats desktop and virtualbox.
I also run proxmox on one machine and theres currently VM for nextcloud and librenms and opnsense, will be adding urbackup to it soon once I am done testing shit
Dear god, i discovered urbackup like week ago, and it seems fucking amazing

sorry for life story, but you asked

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>Have shitty enterprise applications
>IO heavy and latency sensitive
>Management: "Virtual servers and cloud only."
At least the application vendor is not shit and helps us patch/tune the applications to resolve the stability issues. Would be DOA if they didn't.
Too bad the virtualisation infrastructure is extremely over provisioned and that really causes most of the problems.

This, basically.

R7 370, onboard sound, and PCI network card for linux, 1060 and Xonar sound for windows. Literally only keep it around for the 3 video games I still care about that aren't Factorio or Binding of Isaac, the Adobe suite, Vegas, 3DS Max, and Substance Designer.

It's so fucking good, being able to literally just run a command and switch my monitor's input to start windows. The future is finally here and now I can stop sucking bill gates' dinky. Plus when I get called an nvidia shill on here I can just bust out the "lspci | grep VGA". Added bonus yo.

harmful shit, harmful shit, harmful shit, harmful shit.
also not really that more secure

>Virtual servers and cloud only
Yeah, no. We tried that with IBM, basically simple web servers with a few thousand incoming requests a second. The VMs started choking and we had a lot of trouble with the network, despite the resources being generously sized. Turns out their infrastructure just couldn't take it and we had to migrate everything to bare metal. Azure is even more fun, I/O performance is bound to the AMOUNT of storage you book, not the type. So if you want to run some I/O heavy tasks which require bascially no storage though, the VM will still have to be provisioned with 4 or more terabyte of disk space since that's apparently how it works.

The life story was preferable.
The goal was to get a solid view of these things.

>not really that more secure
not really that more secure
Seriously?

well, yeah, you can escape virtual machines as well

vektorius

>We tried that with IBM, basically simple web servers with a few thousand incoming requests a second.
Hehe, our application vendor...
I'm going to blame them for the, oh, 35 TPS we get due to their software being shit. This is on a 18 node cluster, 16-24 cores, 32GB on each VM.
>I/O performance is bound to the AMOUNT of storage you book
Similar to AWS if you use EBS. Does Azure let you get dedicated SSDs or no?

But yeah, at this point, given the "fun" we've had with the on-prem virtualisation vendor, I'm glad we're moving to the cloud.
But it does let our retarded cloud infrastructure teams do shit like, shutdown servers or change their startup/shutdown times at random for "cost savings" when the damn testers are running their suites. Without telling anyone of course, and that makes my life fun.
Pic is me most days. [/blog]

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Testing different Linux distros

>tfw can't gpu passthrough

They are useful for a couple things, namely
1.) Sandboxing. Run servers from a VM image and you have an extra layer of security in the case that the VM gets compromised
2.) Testing & Development. I use QEMU and KVM every day for prototyping the OS I am working on and other software that I don't use a docker image for.
3.) Just running other OSes. PCI passthrough for a windows VM lets you do gaming while still keeping all that windows cancer in a little box.

Originally setup a VM since headhunters kept promising me it would be worth my time and all the jerbs would pay me the Big Bux. Since they never delivered, I replaced it with Windows VMs and play old vidya or make copies and use them as chuckers on sketchy sites.

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>What do you use them for?
E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G

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I use VMs to sandbox malware like Mozilla Firefox

I use VM for browsing

* no dependency on hardware
* administering (virtual) "hardware" remotely

For business uses we use them for everything obviously. At home or lab I use them for testing applications, installs, and in some cases migration or implementation procedures. At home I run a windows server for local domain and dns, a pi-hole on Linux for ad blocking, and a Linux server just to have one (rarely touch it). None of these run on virtual box, but I do have vbox installed on my home and work PC just in case I need some immediate VM for testing or such.

>All these things
>user, just poke around VMs and you'll understand networking, linux etc
Why would anyone read anything, lol, just try it and it will come naturally

you can run packet tracer on mac

What are you doing in your VM that uses VT-d?

that's how I learned
git gud son

If you can't see the use of VMs then you are sadly retarded.