Ask HN: Has anyone used Proxmox for a daily-driver laptop?
I want to run Proxmox as the host OS on a powerful laptop with several VMs for dedicated uses, and a dGPU for the primary VM.
On this laptop I want to run:
pfSense Windows 11 Linux (Fedora Silverblue) RancherOS ~some rescue Linux~
I want pfSense to be the arbiter for all things networking, hosting a paravirtualized network device to the other VMs. My only firewall to manage is at the VM that operates pfsense. None of the guests will have a firewall. Windows is just for gaming and occasional class work (to run proctoring software I can't get away from). My primary OS would be Fedora Silverblue, because I'm really hot on rpm-ostree/immutable Linux images. I think this is the future, being able to extend/build/publish your changes so easily on Dockerhub is just amazeballs and the overlay-nature of it is spectacular to fallback to a working image. RancherOS is a separate k3s-hosting distro to run services off of. I'd prefer these to be isolated on another VM, but accessible from my primary. And then I need some minimal Linux distro to fallback to if truly nothing works. Proxmox should start the rescue Linux if all others fail so I can... rescue.
The last odd thing here is I believe I need a laptop with a MUX switch. So the integrated GPU will show me the Proxmox console, and the dedicated GPU will be offered to either the Windows 11 or Fedora guest for gaming.
I think this should all work. I think it would be incredibly powerful to separate concerns in separate VMs. "You do networking, you do gaming, you do docker & k8s, you do everything else/primary work". Laptops have never surpassed desktops in performance, but I think we're there that we have enough performance to do this.
I don't know anyone yet doing /this/, so I'm asking for info. I remember I ran into a lot of trouble a year ago trying to splinter off virtual functions of an integrated Intel GPU so each VM had its own virtual device with acceleration. Intel is trying to go in that direction, but I don't know if AMD has a similar facility. What should be easier is just handing off a dGPU to a VM.
(Yes, I have heard of Cubes OS and it's not what I'm looking for)