To clarify I am not asking about a dedicated machine running something like Proxmox or Esxi. My question is about VMs running on your daily use machine on something like VirtualBox, VM ware fusion, parallels etc
I have my main/gaming rig that I use for everything unrelated to my career, and I run a Hyper V VM on/with it that I strictly use for just my daily job. (Work from home sysadmin for an MSP)
The company I work for provided me with hardware that I can connect at home and use, but it’s much more convenient for me to get everything done utilizing all of my monitors and gaming hardware and not having to have two physical computers set up. The company doesn’t care and I keep the work VM pretty isolated from everything else (well, as much as you can with a Hyper V VM and still get all of the functionality I crave.)
Have you considered a physical KVM switch? If you have, why did you decide against it?
Are you doing GPU partitioning?
There’s really no need for a KVM switch, I think having two physical computers to deal with in my case would just complicate things. Running the VM for my work life during work hours and then shutting it down once I’m off the clock is super simple already.
As far as GPU partitioning, all of the clients I work with are spending their day working with things like Excel and Outlook, so nothing graphically demanding.
Back at my old job I was able to work from home and they required windows. Using Microsoft HyperV I had 2 windows server 2022 vm’s running on my laptop, setup for active directory. I was triple booting windows 10, 11 and Fedora Linux. Both my windows installs were running the vm’s and my Windows 11 install was joined to the domain. I had to set the vm’s to shut down on system reboot or power off as using the pause feature only worked if the reboot/shutdown returned to the same os. Worked great when it was setup. After I left that job and no longer worked from home I wiped windows and stuck to booting Linux only.
Proxmox backup server on HyperV
Saves me an extra device basically.
Occasionally WSL for AI stuff but it’s annoyingly fragile frankly.
Multipass
My work-from-home workstation always has a VM or two running the test/dev environment for the tasks I’m working on at work. They are VBox instances provisioned/managed by Vagrant.
They are CentOS7 instances, each running a test database, usually a text editor, “tail -F” monitoring log output, and various daemons/services specific to my workplace’s internal infrastructure. The host system is running Slackware 15.0.