Currently I have a dual boot Linux/Win11 PC. When I'm home I use the Linux partition (video games, internet streaming, etc.), and when I'm away on campus/work I use the Windows 11 partition with Windows RDP (Adobe, CAD, etc.), connecting from a separate Windows 11 laptop over a private TailScale network.

This works pretty well (I'm very proud of myself for figuring this out :D), but I still have occasional issues which lock me out of computer when I'm away. I have SSH access to both the Linux and Windows machines, but that connection is entirely dependent on TailScale properly launching at boot remotely. I often forget to reboot into my Windows partition before I leave for classes and I then have to run a grub-reboot command over SSH on the Linux machine in order to reboot remotely into Windows (which then typically auto-starts TailScale and lets me have RDP access.)

Recently I've been noticing some annoying trade-offs of this method, notably that Windows updates will sometimes cause the system to restart again after being rebooted into Windows remotely, booting it back into the default Linux partition. This would be a minor annoyance if for some reason it didn't also disable TailScale startup on the Linux boot, locking me out of the computer entirely until I get home. This is part of a greater problem inherent to the dual-boot method; I have no remote control of my computer during the actual boot process.

I've been learning a bit about Hypervisors, and to me it sounds like a nice way to ensure that I'll still have SSH access to the computer even if Windows screws up the boot process. From my limited research it seems that Type 2 Hypervisors would be simpler for me to use and functionally the same as a Type 1 in my case (ideally I would turn my pre-existing Linux system into the Type 2 Hypervisor host.)

I've tried using traditional VMs in the past, but issues with GPU passthrough and ease of access made them functionally worse for my uses than a traditional dual-boot (this includes attempts with KVM and QEMU.) I understand that there's a lot of overlap between traditional VMs and Type 2 Hypervisors, so maybe the previous virtualization problems I've had are unavoidable. :(

I'm super open to more complex approaches/solutions if you'd think they'd work better for my case! Part of the reason I've even meddled with my computer like this in the first place is to improve my tech literacy and learn more about how computers work. I don't have any professional background in tech stuff like this, it's just funnnnnnn :D

Maybe it's a stupid question but is it possibile? I messed a lot with firewall on OS inside virtual machine could it do something with firewall on my windows?

You encrypt data at rest and in transit. But what protects it while your applications are using it?

I love QEMU for Virtual Machines on Windows cause it is fast.
But i don´t like the command line that nobody wants to retype.
So I build an App that keeps your machines as configurations you edit in a window,
builds the command line for you, and stays out of the way while the guest runs.

I build it in Rust and EGUI for the GUI. And yes I use AI to help me with finishing it.
It is not a Quick and Dirty Vibe Coded App. I worked on it for over 3 Months.

What it does:

• Machines as configurations. Create, duplicate, and delete virtual machines; each one keeps its own folder, disks, and UEFI variable store.
• A wizard with templates for the usual guests, or direct mode if you would rather set every field yourself.
• UEFI and BIOS, with a per-VM variable store so a guest keeps its own boot entries.
• Disks and drives: qcow2 and raw images, SATA/VirtIO/IDE interfaces, boot order, CD/DVD ISOs.
• Network: user-mode NAT, bridged, or none; VirtIO/e1000/RTL8139 cards; port forwarding.
• Display: VirtIO, std, QXL, Cirrus, or headless; native, GTK, or SDL windows.
• A console that shows the guest's output and keeps it in a log file, with filtering and a line limit.
• Clean shutdown over QMP — the guest is asked to shut down, not killed, with forced stop as a deliberate second step.
• Machines outlive the application. Close FARO while a guest runs and the guest keeps running; start FARO again and it picks the machine back up, proving the machine's identity over QMP before it touches it.
• A pre-flight check before launch: missing images, missing firmware, more memory or cores than the host has, an accelerator this QEMU does not offer.
• Three languages: German, English, French.

You can Download it here. If you find Bugs please let me know!

https://github.com/RayTrunk/faro-qemu-manager/releases/tag/v0.9.0

About five months ago, I posted here about getting copy/paste working in a custom Nutanix AHV VM console.

This started as a side project for an internal use case. I wanted a better way to work with VM consoles, especially when the guest wasn't reachable over the network.

I've now made the entire project open source:

https://github.com/MarcoCarvin/ahv-remote-console

It's a desktop application for Windows, Linux and macOS that opens VM consoles through Prism, with separate windows for each VM, Prism authentication (including SSO), ISO mounting and automatic reconnection.

The main thing I wanted to get working was a proper shared clipboard between the workstation and the VM, similar to VMware Remote Console. Copy something on your workstation and paste it into the guest, or copy something inside the guest and paste it back on your workstation. No simulated keystrokes or one-way text-pasting workaround.

The clipboard works through the console channel, so it doesn't depend on being able to reach the guest over the network. This is particularly useful when working with isolated VMs or guests connected through a full-tunnel VPN.

Clipboard sharing requires an additional module on the AHV hosts and an agent inside the guest VM. Without those components, the application still works as a regular remote console.

One important caveat: the host module installs a libvirt hook and modifies the AHV hosts. It's not part of AHV and isn't supported or endorsed by Nutanix. It may affect support arrangements or break after AHV upgrades, so read the documentation, keep the rollback steps handy, and test in a lab before deploying it.

I built this to solve a problem in our own environment, not as a commercial product. I've published the code under the Apache 2.0 license in case it's useful to other people running AHV or someone wants to take a look at how it works.

Repository: https://github.com/MarcoCarvin/ahv-remote-console

Can anyone please help with VMware ESxi 7.03 Build 20036589 HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 10 HPE Custom image?

So i made a video on how to install kali linux in vmware workstation and also showed how to install vmware in that

For a while I've been running KVM on plain Debian/Ubuntu boxes, and I kept running into the same gap. Cockpit is easy but stops at the basic settings. virt-manager is detailed but it's a desktop app. Proxmox is great, but it wants to be the operating system. I wanted something in between, so I started building it as a side project.

It's called VirtoMir, and I've made it fully open source:

https://github.com/onurbaydas/VirtoMir

It's a web control panel for KVM/QEMU/libvirt. It installs as a single binary on an existing Linux host: no dedicated distro, no database, no agents inside your VMs. It talks to the libvirt you already have and only changes what you ask it to. If you remove it, your VMs, disks and networks stay where they were.

What it does today:

• New-VM wizard: ISO, cloud image with cloud-init, or an existing disk. Windows profile with UEFI, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0
• Browser console over VNC, SPICE (shared clipboard, resolution follows the window) or serial
• A settings form that shows an XML diff before saving, plus a raw XML editor for everything the form doesn't cover, validated by libvirt
• Configuration history for every VM, including changes made with virsh, with one-click restore
• Snapshots, live backups (incremental through libvirt checkpoints), off-site copies with restic
• Live metrics every second and 30 days of history, with no Prometheus needed (there's a Prometheus endpoint if you want one)
• Multiple hosts joined with a one-time code, live migration, and HA with quorum and fencing (IPMI, Redfish or watchdog)
• PAM / LDAP / OIDC sign-in, roles, TOTP, API tokens, OpenAPI spec, plus a Terraform provider and Ansible modules

How it was built. It's a one-person project, and I built it together with AI coding agents. That's how it got this much scope this quickly, and it's also why I'm not going to pretend it's mature. Nobody has reviewed every line by hand. All the tests are unit tests; there are no integration tests against a real libvirt yet.

Caveats, so nobody gets surprised:

• It's 0.9 and early. Tested on Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13, on single hosts and small clusters.
• HA has never been tried on real BMC hardware. There's also no storage-level lock (no sanlock/virtlockd), so I wouldn't trust it with production data yet.
• Live migration data goes over unencrypted TCP. Keep it on a trusted management network.
• OVN SDN, VMware import and DR are experimental and untested on real setups.
• It runs as root, because it needs the libvirt socket and PAM. Put it on a management network or behind your own reverse proxy.

I wrote a detailed technical post on how it works inside and what it does and doesn't support, weak spots included: https://onurbaydas.com/posts/virtomir-en/

If you just want to click around, there's a demo that runs entirely in your browser against a pretend cluster: https://onurbaydas.github.io/VirtoMir/demo/
There's also a one-command script that sets it up in a throwaway VM, so you don't have to touch your real hosts.

I built this for my own setup, not as a commercial product. It's AGPL-3.0, in case it's useful to someone else running KVM, or someone wants to look at how it works. Test reports from distros or hardware I can't reach (Fedora, arm64, Ceph, GPUs, real BMCs) and criticism of the code are very welcome. If anyone wants to contribute, I'd be glad.

Hi all, I am using VirtualBox 7.2.20 Apple Silicon on a MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, I'm running Windows 11 ARM and I have an issue where there is no video output when the video memory is changed at all. I want to increase it to 256MB but I will get no video unless it is set at exactly 128MB. Host OS is MacOS Golden Gate 27.0.1 and Hyper-V is enabled. Any tips? Thanks

Hey, to all members of this group and I just hope all with you all is Good I truly wish everyone in this place a fun, happy time of day or night, week, and year, as well as throughout this full year and even with all of eternity. I’m here to give all the members of this great community a message/letter. I want to say keep up with all the amazing work that everyone in the group is doing, and I know that your lives will be blessed with nothing less than genuine joy and much happiness.

I just wonder if this group has a developer who is knowledgeable enough to help with a brilliant, up-and-coming Linux FOSS project known as Winboat. It is a powerful light of hope for all Linux users, and it will benefit us all who love and care about tech, software, computers, and other similar topics. It simply aims to bring decades' worth of unbelievably high-quality apps to Linux with full ultimate compatibility and usability, unlike anything before it. It can run Windows apps on Linux in a manner that seems as if they are running natively on Linux, even though they are actually running through a virtual machine.

This creates a 3D-like effect in which it detaches a copy of all the installed apps running within the virtual machine and places them into the main OS, which is Linux, as if they are a part of Linux entirely. This is huge because it could end up running all the games Windows ever had, created by various developers around the world, all on an operating system that benefits from being about 100,000 times faster than Windows. Not to mention the gaming enterprise editions it offers, like Cachy, the head of these sub-variants of Linux; Pop!_OS, the daddy of them all; Garuda, the assassin of the kingdom; and Bazite and Nobara, the two masters guarding the gaming kingdom of Linux. All are about 500,000 if not a million times faster on any computer than Windows, which I have tested myself, even on an unbelievably weak laptop.

This Winboat project can drastically and significantly change Linux forever. It can make Linux the fastest of the big three PC operating systems, which are #1 = Windows, #2 = macOS, and #3 = Linux, making it a serious competitor for Windows and Mac. It will not be a joke in any way if it fully develops. The Winboat staff is planning to implement a virtual graphic driver software technology that will enable Windows apps/games to run on Linux with satisfying performance, which is revolutionary for a virtual machine app on Linux.

3D games/apps that require a graphic card to run are among the most difficult things a computer can manage, especially in a virtual machine, where it typically shouldn’t run at all. However, this Winboat VGPU API software called Helios may eventually make it happen in the Winboat VM. You can be a significant reason why it happens. It is similar to Parallels in many ways and does similar things, but Parallels has decades of maintenance and is backed by a top brand, so it will not reach such a level anytime soon—likely never at all. Nonetheless, it can be more than enough for what Linux users need from Windows in terms of apps, especially for fairly light gaming from the 2000s up to 2014. It will be satisfying enough and may even run on handheld gaming consoles with Linux, such as Steam Valve devices, without needing to install the extra Steam app.it may run gta vice city I played GTA vc with a CD my friend got and simply gave to us on a weak ass Low end family family computer which is the first I ever had with my brothers and boy did it run win so 2000s games won't be much to run at all with a fully developed winboat VM / Helios vgpu halo combat evolve and such will run if it developers total overdose you name it from the early 2000s -2014 That won't need dx 12 runtime software which is way way way too advanced to run where not even Parallels can run it as good as para is with the decades of Billionare brand/company investment and development it has had throughout

I posted this on some discord servers but forgot to post here lol.. Anyway https://github.com/jmacato/VistaRenewed if you want to take a look at the code. Not ready yet for plug and play install.

I've always wanted to see Windows Vista's aero running in its full glory, without having to hunt down old hardware, and given that VM's have advanced over the years, it should've been more than possible to get that fancy effect running properly (VirtualBox tried but yeah...)

So when i saw https://blog.getutm.app/2026/introducing-triton-directx-11-driver-for-qemu/ I got the inspiration to try and port it to Vista's WDDM SDK. After a few weeks worth of debugging and much chagrin, i was reaalllly thrilled to see Aero alive again!

Then i when i was playing with it, i kinda wanted to have a more well-rounded experience with it, so i figured, wine can replace IE with gecko right? that's just replacing MSHTML afaik... then it hit me. CEF -> some shim that fakes MSHTML -> iexplore! And boy surely did it work!

The sidebar stuff was relatively easy given it's just a collection of small html + js widgets.

anyway thank you for listening in to my crappy TED talk! Hope you find this of use or something :)

Note: Made with AI-assistance. This is just for fun anyway :)

Hi all, i am currently learning the KVM/QEMU virtualization platform by going through the book "Mastering KVM Virtualization 2nd edition". the book mentions oVirt as a tool for kvm host management for multiple kvm host machines.

I looked up oVirt and found it is not popular and it's subbreddit is kind of dead. that really made me question if i should use it and led to find any popular alternatives. ( being popular comes with the benefit of having a lot of community support, thus my need for a popular alternative)

I heard about Proxmox DE while finding but found out that it does not use libvirt api, so i wanted to know about any tools that do use libvirt/KVM/QEMU.

Thanks in advance

Hello guys, could anyone help me to prepare for this exam VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator (2V0-17.25) exam.
If anyone pass through this process can help me I will appreciate it.

Hello guys, could anyone help me to prepare for this exam VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator (2V0-17.25) exam.
If anyone pass through this process can help me I will appreciate it.

This looks super interesting. Would love to hear if anybody’s tried it yet since it just came out.

Can someone please tell on how to bridge virsh VM s network to locan lan network, beacause im have multiple vm s on a single server which i have hosted a kubernetes custom iso (control plane and worker planes) and i have another server with a different worker-node, the control plane vm has 192.168.122.0:24 ip and the worker-node server is 10.1.10.0/23

Can somebody tell me an example of why I need to downsize and upsize a virtual machine? I got asked and I'm looking for an actual, relevant problem which is solved by resizing.

so guys, i want to learn about virtualization in the context of system administration and other related fields like devops, cloud etc.

so, i have read "virtualization essentials 3rd edition" book. got a good introductory understanding of virtualization technology. but i don't know how to move forward from here. I mean, i don't know what are the practical stuff that i should be learning, what other resources out there, and what is the stuff that i should be learning instead of reading more theory.

I know that for starters i need to get good at using and managing a single virtualiation platform. I currently use KVM/QEMU for my projects. so, i am thinking about choosing it as the virtualizaton platform to get good at instead of other virtualization platforms like vmware, virtualbox, etc.

and also, i have a few more questions:

1. what to learn and how much to learn if the goal is to become competent enough for admin level jobs?
2. what books/resources/guides would you recommend if my goal is both practical knowledge and skill building.

Thank you so much in advance.

​

> Hi, I need some help with a VirtualBox performance issue.

My Windows 11 25H2 VM is extremely laggy in VirtualBox. The mouse cursor stutters, window animations are slow, and sometimes the VM freezes.

Host:

Ryzen 7 8700F

RTX 5060

32 GB DDR5

1 TB NVMe SSD

Windows 11

VirtualBox 7.2.20

VM:

Windows 11 25H2

8 GB RAM

4 CPU cores

UEFI

TPM 2.0

Secure Boot

Guest Additions installed

I have tested 3D acceleration both enabled and disabled, but the VM is still very laggy.

The strange thing: the exact same Windows 11 25H2 ISO runs smoothly in VMware Workstation on the same PC. Even the mouse cursor is smooth during installation.

Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Platform are disabled on the host.

What could cause this difference between VirtualBox and VMware? Are there any VirtualBox settings I should try for Windows 11 25H2?

I made this funny little game that shows visually how a microVM orchestrator operates. It's really simple and doesn't include all the complexity, but it's nice and fun to show to people that do not understand microVMs

Play with it: https://nibrunner.dev

Repo: https://github.com/ilbertt/nibrunner

Took me more time than anticipated, but its finally here >.<

my end goal for this (quite big) hobby project is to be able to make a simple clone of AWS's EC2, from the grounds up, above a type 1 hypervisor (as a POC, not a real prod software).

What I finished implementing all the way up to now:

- Type-1 hypervisor written from scratch in Zig, booted by GRUB

- Its own bare-metal kernel: higher-half paging, GDT/IDT, interrupts and 3 distinct memory allocators (yes, I use them all)

- Intel VT-x with EPT (Extended Page Tables) backing guest memory

- Emulating CPUID, MSRs, CR's (CR0/CR3/CR4), and some I/O stuff.

- Virtual devices: interrupt controller (PIC) and serial console

- Booting an unmodified Linux kernel to userspace (initramfs)

The road to finishing is long but I still see this part as a great milestone >-<

source: https://github.com/NoamRothschild/hypervisor

Hi I've only started my HackTheBox setting up course today and I'm already running into some issue's, I have a windows 11 virtual machine that I need to set up and every time I use it, 5-10 mins after the machine boots to the home screen, it suddenly freezes I cant use CTRL+ALT+DELETE or anything no response, all I can is shutdown the machine, any advice?

I'm using VirtualBox as my VM loader and the specs of the VM itself:

Operating System: Windows 11 (64-bit)

Base Memory: 8GB

Processors: 4

Like a lot of people here, the VMware/Broadcom licensing changes got me looking hard at what I was actually paying for, and whether Hyper-V could replace it. Honest answer: the hypervisor's fine, the management story is the problem.

The problem: there's no clean, modern control plane for a small Hyper-V fleet the way vCenter is for vSphere. The realistic options today are SCVMM (not free, clunky, feels half-abandoned), Windows Admin Center (single-host focused, not really a fleet orchestrator), or hand-rolled PowerShell/DSC scripts. I looked at existing FOSS options before building anything and didn't find one that treats Hyper-V as a first-class citizen with declarative, continuously-reconciled desired state across multiple hosts and clusters, most FOSS orchestration in this space targets KVM/Proxmox/oVirt, not Hyper-V specifically.

What it does: Ballast is a control plane and agent for Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters. Each host runs an agent that pulls its desired config from the centre and keeps enforcing it continuously. If the centre goes offline, the host doesn't freeze or drift, it just keeps honouring whatever it was last told (network config, cluster membership, etc.) and catches back up automatically once the centre's reachable again.

Also handles: standalone host and failover cluster provisioning (SET-teamed switches, mgmt vNICs, Storage Spaces Direct + CSV), VM lifecycle and templates, live migration, Hyper-V Replica-based DR runbooks, and VMware migration tooling that streams VMDKs straight in.

Why this is relevant here: a fair few people in this sub run Hyper-V, either because it came free with a Windows Server licence they already had, or specifically to avoid VMware's licensing. Community tier is free forever for one cluster of any size plus unlimited standalone hosts, which covers the overwhelming majority of homelab-scale setups, so this isn't a "pay to use it at all" pitch.

AI disclosure: most of the actual code, tests, and documentation were written by Claude Code (an AI coding agent), working under my direction. I drove the architecture and product decisions, tested every change against real Hyper-V hosts and clusters, and reported/debugged live issues myself, but I'm not going to pretend a human typed every line. Being upfront about that rather than letting the code style speak for itself and getting called out for it later.

Honesty about the model: it's open-core. The agent, the piece that runs with elevated privileges on your hosts, is fully open source (Apache 2.0), with commit history going back to June: https://github.com/halvantic/hyperv-control-plane. The centre (the control plane/console) is closed source. A paid tier for multi-cluster/SSO/audit logging is coming, but pricing isn't locked yet.

Would genuinely like to hear where it falls over, what's missing versus what you're used to, or what looks broken to someone kicking the tyres for the first time.

More info: https://ballast.halvantic.com