It has always bugged me that using a few different OSes and/or tools means making changes and/or rebooting an awful lot. For example - used to be that when I wanted to install a system clone from an image, I'd have to boot Macrium from DVD or USB, do the restore, then reboot into Boot Repair Disk - and quite often also into Gparted or Partedmagic before then rebooting into the target PC's newly installed OS. This all changed with Ventoy - and now it is much quicker & slicker, having all those ISOs on a single USB stick. But still - what if I use Linux more than 90% of the time, Android and/or windoze also some parts of the time ?? Multi-booting ?? Meh. Multiple PCs ?? Also meh. VMs via Virtualbox and/or VMWare - OK, but rather demanding, fiddly & clunky. Swappable drives ?? OK - that works pretty well, but only with shutdowns & startups in-between. Enter the bare-metal hypervisor, which promises to run on base h/w & allowing to have multiple OSes available quickly, easily & simultaneously. Grrrr...here come the obnoxious big names & learning curves...bleah. I've known about the M$ & VMWare offerings for this for quite a while & frankly want neither of them, so I've held off on this ambition. A while ago I ran across a YT video by 'Morgonaut' which pointed at Proxmox for doing exactly this - but despite all the lengthy blather it really had zero how-to info. Today I got another notification for a Morgonaut video, and once again - all sizzle & no steak. I am not at all a newbie to computing or Linux or using VMs via those apps I mentioned - BUT I am totally new to Proxmox. So I did some searching for anything like Proxmox for newbies, dummies or beginners & really didn't find much...so: I will greatly appreciate any pointers from other folks here who have had success using Proxmox, please ?? Thanks.
Hi smallhagrid, I don't know how much help I'll be, but I'll try and give you some pointers. Like you I was using older VM software Virtual PC/Server, VirtualBox, and VMWare, All had their problems, but were safer than Multi-Booting. I switched back and forth between Hyper-V, Xen Server and ESXi. All were either to bloated, to limited, to corporate or to clunky. In recent years I've been swapping between Proxmox, XCP-ng and Unraid. And your right just about every tutorial you find is either out of date, overly complicated, or for Linux Guru's only. Heres my little take on these Hypervisors: Proxmox: I had real problems with setting up or using multiple HDD's, in Proxmox especially when they were different sizes and/or speeds. But I hear this has gotten better with version 7. XCP-ng: You really need to use 'Xen Orchestra' a VM to control the Hypervisor. Which I used to do with Hyper-V Server. (I had a WinXP VM to RDP into the Hypervisor) The problem is I'm far more comfortable dealing with any issues that occur in Windows than I am in Linux. Also any type of H/W Pass-Through is very hard with XCP-ng Unraid: Although Unraid isn't a Hypervisor, it is what I now use at home for VM's and Containers. It is very limited in what you can do from the GUI, because its an addon to a File/Media server. But its basically the same Hypervisor as Proxmox under the GUI. I haven't tried TureNAS but my guess is it would be like Unraid as its a File Server first. What all these Hypervisors have in common is they are based on QEMU/KVM so almost any tutorials or guides you find for one will help with the others. But, you will have to play with the syntax of the files. (see my last posts for Modified Bios for KVM/Qemu/Bochs Bios? for an example) Another advantage I've found is, if you install QEMU/KVM or Virt-Manager on another PC/VM you can use it to connect to the Hypervisor allowing you greater control over the VM's than you sometimes get from the Hypervisor GUI. Not to mention if you create a VM in either one its fairly easy to transfer it to the other, keeping all the settings. Yeah, Morgonaut used to have great Hackintosh tutorials, but in recent years she's been using YT to push her remote tech services. Rather than How-To's. Which is a shame...
Perhaps just a dream, or a fantasy, but...to easily set up & have... Something sort of like the vague ideas presented in the YT videos by 'Morgonaut'; Just a single PC, which runs just fine - switching smoothly & easily between Linux, windoze & Android OSes in active uses. With or without more than a single screen, thereby erasing the barriers between things having native OS requirements. This still remains a dream - or perhaps a goal not yet met, for me.