vbox on puppy or esxi?

[mohittomar13]

I hate when I have to reinstall and reconfigure a system after HDD failure. In the past 14 months 3HDDs failed already and I am totally frustrated. Im planning on using a VM where I just have to copy paste the hdd image and have all settings and files available.

While doing my research I found there is something called esxi which could solve the problem but wouldn't it be an overkill for a simple task. But with Vbox i have to make regular backups of the virtual hdd image. Im not sure what way should I go.

All i want is 1 windows 1 xubuntu and 1puppy image. Currently I have quadboot system with debiandog as a hacking testing OS.

I was planning to use puppy as the host system with vbox installed and other systems as virtual.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[Jafadmin]

ESXI is a bare-metal Hypervisor. VirtualBox is a hosted Hypervisor. In both cases if you don't do backups you lose your VM's if a HD crashes.

Personally, I don't think an i3 proc is sufficient for running a VM host. I doubt you will like it.

My best recommendation after 30 years as an IT sysadmin is that you would be better served by using Clonezilla to clone your HDD once it is set up and running the way you want. https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

You can do disk-to-disk cloning or disk-to-image cloning. Get an esata or USB cradle and an extra disk. Run your clone/backup late saturday nights or whatever suits you.

Just my .02$

[mohittomar13]

Given your 30 yrs of experience I think I should follow your suggestion. By the way what would be your minimum and maximum recommended proc for a VM host machine.

Thanks

[Geek3579]

Another idea is to run Lubuntu and Puppy on separate USBs, which can work OK on older or slower machines. Just backup Lubuntu via clonezilla and copy/paste the Puppy savefolder or savefile .

Puppy is made for USBs and Lubuntu clones with in-built persistence can be found here: https://phillw.net/isos/linux-tools/persistent/ and are written to USB via an image burner such as Easydd or Balena (Linux) or Rufus (Windows)

You can frugally install Puppy Linux within Lubuntu and have only one USB to worry about.

[mohittomar13]

Thanks for your help

[Jafadmin]

Given your 30 yrs of experience I think I should follow your suggestion. By the way what would be your minimum and maximum recommended proc for a VM host machine.

Thanks

I run VM's on a 3.2ghz Dell i5 with 10Gb of ram. If your i3 is fast, it might do fine, but I think yours is 2ghz, right?.

In your situation I would run each OS on it's own partition instead of VM's and use Clonezilla for backups.

[p310don]

I have XP VMs running two at a time on an i7. Works great. I have run Win10 at the same time as the two XP VMs, but it does stress it out a bit. This is in a work environment, so stuff must work all the time. If that i7 fails, I have an i3 that will run the two XPs no problems. Then I have an older AMD something or other that is about half a fast, and it does the job too.

It depends on what you want to do in your guest machines. I run Point of Sale software, which isn't particular taxing on the CPU (it is on the HDD). If you want to run heavy stuff, look at ways of doing it natively.