Best VM for legacy line of business windows Foxpro app?

wrhite

New Member
Aug 16, 2021
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Relatively new to pve...

We have to use a line of business application ("PM" in Visual Foxpro) under Windows. PM makes use of OLE to MS Word as a document generator.

So two Windows apps. Three users.

Our Proxmox setup is very modest: HP 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 v5 @ 3.30GHz (1 Socket), 32Gb ram

Present VM setup is a linux VM running SME Server (headless, for a Samba file server, router and mail server) and 3 Windows VMs which all works fine, apart from the appalling PBS backup performance on the windows VMs. I want to drop Windows altogether.

So I experimented with a standalone 32bit Dell running Linux XFCE. I installed Wine and PM and MS Word and bingo! it all works fine.

So how to migrate this to pve? Rather than have 3 linux VMs all set up like that why not have 3 containers? I have no experience with containers but from what I understand they have lower overhead than VMs.

If I am to go the container route (should I?), or even stick with using VMs, what would be the best linux distribution to use in the container or VM? As far as I can see I would only need Wine and the ability to get to our file server for samba and smtp outbound.

On the other hand would I need to include in my container or VM all the automated procedures to get and install security updates etc... Or, given that the containers/VMs would have no direct access to the outside world could I get away with say once a year manual update?

Perhaps it would be best to create 3 more SME Server VMs (SME Server can auto update, but will it run Wine ok?)?

[An edited thought] Install one linux VM with three users each running the Windows apps under wine in their own user environment?
[Another edit] - running all vms on ZFS raid - 3 4tB disks

Thank you for reading this far and any and all suggestions welcome.
 
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