There are sane people with this many VMs on a personal machine, right? RIGHT?
Half of these exist because I was bored once.
The Windows 10 and MacOS ones are GPU passthrough enabled and what I occasionally use if I have to use a Windows or Mac application. Windows 7 is also GPU enabled, but is more a nostalgia thing than anything.
I think my PopOS VM was originally installed for fun, but I used it along with my Arch Linux, Debian 12 and Testing (I run Testing on host, but I wanted a fresh environment and was too lazy to spin up a Docker or chroot), Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora to test various software builds and bugs, as I don't like touching normal Ubuntu unless I must.
The Windows Server 2022 one is one I recently spun up to mess with Windows Docker Containers (I have to port an app to Windows, and was looking at that for CI). That all become moot when I found out Github's CI doesn't support Windows Docker containers despite supporting Windows runners (The organization I'm doing it for uses Github, so I have to use it).
GPU passthrough has always been one of those exciting ideas I’d love to dive into one day. My current GPU being a little older, has only 4GB of RAM. Oh the joy's of being a budget PC user. Thankfully it's more of a "would be nice rather" than an "actually need"....
I run a different LXC on Proxmox for every service, so it's a bunch. Probably a better way to do it since most of those just run a docker container inside them.
Serious answer, I'm not sure why someone would run a VM to run just a container inside the VM, aside from the VM providing volumes (directories) to the VM. That said, VMs are perfectly capable of running containers, and can run multiple containers without issue. For work, our Gitlab instance has runners that are VMs that just run containers.
I like to run a hypervisor host as just that, a hypervisor host. The host being stable is important, and also reduce attack surface by only having it as that.
An LXC per service is somewhat overkill. A docker host running on LXC could likely run all the docker containers.
Nah, most of the windows ones don’t get updates any more and the Linux ones can get a script that updates on boot. Takes longer to start up but handles the job itself.
And that's why there's a "-2" on the end of that arch vm - there was one before that I borked while trying to update it because I hadn't used it in so long.
I've had physical esx servers running this many VMS simultaneously, and I can totally see why a hobbiest or dev would have a bed for this many VMs on standby. You are sane, yes
On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than "I was bored". In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can't normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can't/don't want to use my phone.
I use one VM for each iteration of my automation software. Our factory has machines ranging from the 90s to present day, and they use different software environments to be programmed. In order to minimize the risk of data loss, we have one virtual machine with every software environment, that way if one gets corrupted, the damage is contained. It also makes them easier to export to new computers when we need to replace ours.
It's a terabyte SSD. I've currently got 136 GB left on it. I think part of it might be they're auto-expanding qcow2 images, so they don't actually take up the full space provisioned for them.
I have probably a couple of more Linux/BSD VMs than here (with some with GPU passthrough and one or two for ARM crossbuilding and so on) but only 2 Windows VMs - the only 2 I have legitimate licenses for.
10, plain 11, 7, and funny enough, Server 2022 are all legit licenses (I can get a key for server through my university). Actually, I'm pretty sure the 11 one, I upgraded a Windows 7 VM to 10, then to 11.
Every other Windows version that needs it (11 LTSC, 8.1, and Vista), I just temporarily host a phony KMS server whenever it needs to be reactivated.
I apologize for talking so much about Windows on a Linux sub. May Stallman break into my house and give me 10 lashes as I slumber.