Using proxmox and a Desktop enviroment

[kcallis]

I am sure that the posting question is a little confusing. I recently picked up a Thinkpad T420 laptop, and I added a M.2 ssd, two 1TB ssd drives, 16G RAM and a quad core i7 processor for my daily driver work laptop. For grins and giggles, I thought I would install Proxmox so I could get the biggest bang for the buck by spinning some images and containers.

I have read that people have used desktop machines to run proxmox, have several VM running, but use (for instance) a Windows 10 image and use it as the main display for (work) and in the background (of sort), run over VMs. I guess what I am asking is, setup Proxmox to let me have a (for instance) Windows 10 on my display, in the same vein of the way Virtualbox uses guest and can get a full blown desktop?

That would be outstanding if I could do that!!!

 

[kcallis]

With a little googling, I have come to realize that I can do this with Spice. Now that leads to another question. Say that my son uses Linux on his desktop. For some reason, he needs to do some work on Microsoft Office. The question becomes, how can I setup up that my son can connect to the Windows 10 image that I created on my proxmox server?

 

[LnxBil]

I guess what I am asking is, setup Proxmox to let me have a (for instance) Windows 10 on my display, in the same vein of the way Virtualbox uses guest and can get a full blown desktop?

Technically yes, but, you will not get the performance that VMware Workstation, VirtualBox or Parallels delivers. Those are all desktop virtualization products optimized for delivering interactive graphics and program performance, PVE is however a server enterprise virtualization (which can also deliver good GPU performance via GPU passthroughing, but that is not what you asked).

The question becomes, how can I setup up that my son can connect to the Windows 10 image that I created on my proxmox server?

Easiest way is Windows internal RDP.
If you want to do this via PVE, your son needs to have a PVE account on your webinterface and permissions for the VM, then he has to download the SPICE file via the PVE GUI and run it through virt-viewer, which works quite nice in Linux (on MacOS and Windows, this is harder)

 

[BobhWasatch]

If you are using Windows 10 as your main desktop, you might want to look at Hyper-V for running VM's. It comes with Windows and allows the host dom0 desktop to access graphics and sound in a seamless way. There is less support for running old or non-standard guests but if you're just running some Linux servers it works well.

OTOH Proxmox would be a better bet if your main desktop is Linux or you want extra flexibility regarding guests.

 

[kcallis]

If you are using Windows 10 as your main desktop, you might want to look at Hyper-V for running VM's. It comes with Windows and allows the host dom0 desktop to access graphics and sound in a seamless way. There is less support for running old or non-standard guests but if you're just running some Linux servers it works well.

OTOH Proxmox would be a better bet if your main desktop is Linux or you want extra flexibility regarding guests.

Linux is my daily driver, so I would actually be doing Ubuntu or Centos as the desktop side. Occasionally, I need to do either Windows 7 or 10 as a front facing desktop. For the most part, I would just let PM run unmolested, but I do want the ability to show a desktop off of a VM.

 

[janssensm]

Linux is my daily driver, so I would actually be doing Ubuntu or Centos as the desktop side. Occasionally, I need to do either Windows 7 or 10 as a front facing desktop. For the most part, I would just let PM run unmolested, but I do want the ability to show a desktop off of a VM.

It really depends on your use case and what you actually want to do with your system and vm's.
As I run openSUSE Tumbleweed as main os on my laptop, I cannot install proxmox inside it, as it is debian based.
My laptop has somewhat similar specs as yours (Dell XPS 13, 16 GB, 1TB nvme, i7, 2 core with hyperthreading, but thanks to intel's cpu mitigations HT has significantly less advantage ...)
For vm's that require much performance I simply use Virt Manager with qemu kvm.
It works great, enough features to manage desktop vm's and it's available in the repositories of many distro's.

I also enabled nested virtualization (#1) on my laptop.
This is necessary to run Proxmox inside qemu-kvm.
The performance is not maximum, but it will work, enough to use it as a Proxmox testing setup, but also running several vm's inside it, which can be desktops.

#1 https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Nested_Virtualization