[GTALUG] Living in Virtual Machines

[Giles Orr]

I have this idea that's been slowly forming in my head.  I wanted to
run it by TLUG for opinions to find out if I'm totally crazy or if it
might work.

I hope to set up my desktop (and probably my laptop as well) to have a
Debian stable base OS - about as stripped as I can manage, just X with
a lightweight window manager (probably OpenBox).  On top of that would
be VirtualBox, the idea being to run all my applications from virtual
machines.

Since I'd have multiple machines accessing the same /home/, I'd want
NFS.  That could be run by the host OS, but I was thinking about using
OpenWRT as the NFS server.  But that immediately runs into a
difficulty: it appears that getting the VirtualBox Guest Additions
running in OpenWRT is (very?) difficult, so I'd probably have to use
raw partition access.  The problem with that is that if the partition
is accessed simultaneously by any application on the host OS, you can
munge the partition.

I'm also planning on running another OpenWRT instance: this would be
used for routing, with all the other virtual machines going through it
to access the outside world.  Among other things, that would mean I
only have to administer a firewall in one place.  One idea I'm still
considering is giving full control of the network card to the OpenWRT
instance and making the host OS go through OpenWRT to get to the
outside world ...

This could all probably be done with KVM rather than VirtualBox, but I
prefer VB not only because I'm more familiar with it, but also because
.VDI disc images can vary in size (Qemu's .qcow2 image format are
fixed size) and because VirtualBox handles full screen display of OSes
better (at least once Guest Additions is installed).  I'm happy to
listen to reasons in favour of KVM.

Other virtual machines would include TinyCore, SliTaz, and Debian
Stretch.  The latter would probably be my primary OS.  The thought was
to ssh from the host OS to the guest with X forwarding, and then run a
launcher from the guest on the host so any applications run from the
launcher were from the guest.

Advantages:
- I get to tinker with multiple OSes (something I enjoy)
- if I'm about to go to a dubious website, I can clone a virtual
machine, use it for the dubious visit, then destroy it

Disadvantages that I've thought of so far:
- memory usage
- speed reduction
- hard drive usage for disk images
- complexity
- mounting USB sticks on guests is extremely problematic
- playing sound/video from guests through the host is imperfect
- hard to determine where an application is running from

I'm sure there are many, many other problems with this idea.  Go to
town, that's why I'm here.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com