Developer Workstation questions

[Barry George]

Disclaimer: Noob to Proxmox and not a lot further down the track as a Linux admin..

I wanted to replace my Mint machine running Vbox as a development workstation here at work. Using hot corners and such it was a great solution to be able to run my main Winblows 10 Admin workstation and develop other OS's at the same time all in there own workspace from the Mint Host. However very poor HDD performance degrading through the day caused me to have to reboot my Winblows box every other day or more.

So I'm looking to do the same with Proxmox which I have currently installed with X-Windows and xfce. I'm trying to get my work Windows Admin machine up and running quickly as I learn the ins and outs of Proxmox and this adventure. I'm hoping it will be successful but could use a little guidance from the experience from the forum.
Of course I'd like to leave the xfce and proxmox workspace as clean and stripped down as possible as the host. Doing everything else from the VM's

At the moment I've have an MX-Linux VM and a Mint 18.2 Vm installed to play with. I was hoping to convert my Vbox .vmdk winblow VM into something I can import into Proxmox. There seems to be a good Youtube on that which I'll follow, but MX and Mint vm's are my testing 'learning' vm's right now for how to use Proxmox 5.4

So Question #1 is how to get full screen native resolution through to my workspaces eg 1600 x 1440 on dual monitors. I have an Nvidia Quadro FX4600 card in the machine right now. I 'think' Proxmox is using the preinstalled Nouveau drivers? but I'm not 100% sure.

I've done some searching and reading but am a little confused as to the options to make this work. I seem to have either NoVNC and Spice as options for graphics/console.. It was pretty easy to do in Vbox and of course I don't mind learning as I go but would like to get off my laptop beside me for doing my Windows Admin job at work here...

I've figured out how to add LVM storage (500GB SSD drive) to proxmox and have by VM's running from there (great performance using the VitIO drivers). I also have an Ext4 formatted 9TB Raid 5 Array running though an old IBM/LSI ServeRAID M5014 card.. the performance sucks on that but that's a battle I'll fight once I can get my Windows machine up and stable on the SSD.

Sorry for the long post and hopefully someone won't mind helping me a long.. Cheers

 

[LnxBil]

Emulating desktop grade OSes like Windows 10 with good desktop integration on a developer host is not very performant if at all possible. You're best served with a desktop virtualization product and not with a server virtualization product like PVE. The performance is just not that good for stuff like watching videos or running flash inside of VM.

If you really want to do it, you need SPICE and its integration into any OS is not that smooth as installing guest additions like in VBOX. Most of the time, it works but you have to fiddle around a bit. I can see the benefits for running this on a PVE cluster in your datacenter on enterprise hardware, but tackling all of the problems with this on you machine ... you need to really want to tackle new problems.

 

[Barry George]

Emulating desktop grade OSes like Windows 10 with good desktop integration on a developer host is not very performant if at all possible. You're best served with a desktop virtualization product and not with a server virtualization product like PVE. The performance is just not that good for stuff like watching videos or running flash inside of VM.

If you really want to do it, you need SPICE and its integration into any OS is not that smooth as installing guest additions like in VBOX. Most of the time, it works but you have to fiddle around a bit. I can see the benefits for running this on a PVE cluster in your datacenter on enterprise hardware, but tackling all of the problems with this on you machine ... you need to really want to tackle new problems.

Appreciate the honest response LnxBil. I guess I'll have to head back to the DarkSide for my workstation anyway... I just have so many crashes with Winblows, but it goes with the job! haha... That said I'll throw Proxmox on one of our servers and use it for play time.

 

[LnxBil]

That said I'll throw Proxmox on one of our servers and use it for play time.

That's good. Best to play around somewhere else and have your host on which you're doing your daily job ready to work. You can test on the remote machine if everything works as expected and move to PVE on your machine if everything works. Connectionwise, it does not matter where your VM runs, you always have to connect to it through network, even on your local machine.