this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Question About Virtual Machine under Linux for work (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi,

I'm considering transitioning completely to Linux for my main workstation. However, due to the nature of my work I rely extensively on a few Autodesk products (namely AutoCAD, Revit) as well as Ms OneDrive to coordinate with clients. I did some research and these applications are not available natively and can't run through Wine. So I was thinking setting up a virtual machine with a windows image in order to run these two programs. They don't need extensive GPU. I was wondering if there are any obstacles / issues I should be aware if I chose to go this route? Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

do this at my job right now too.

The biggest obstacle is understanding your hardware limitations. A windows VM needs a lot of resources.

Basically, for windows 11 you are going to want to give the VM a minimum of 4 CPU threads (6 is better), 8 GB of RAM (16 is better), and at least 128 GB of storage.

If your PC has the resources to spare you can host windows as a guest os pretty well without too much lag.

You are going to to want to do some research on which vm management application to use depending on your host distro and your personal workflow. Some are easier than others but us proprietary code, some are fully FOSS and well documented but require a bit of tinkering

I personally use KVM, qemu, and virt-manager on arch for my vms. I was even able to emulate a TPM on my older desktop with a package from the AUR.

If you also use an arch based distro and are interested in KVM, qemu, and virt-manager, I can post my docs here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fantastic. I have a second internal hdd can i designate that as a partition for this vm? Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think there are ways to do that but I didn't research it.

Here are my docs for whati did to get it working in arch.

Install virt-manager on Arch

install the required pkgs

sudo pacman -Syu --needed virt-manager qemu-desktop libvirt edk2-ovmf dnsmasq vde2 bridge-utils iptables-nft dmidecode libguestfs

update /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf

sudo sed -i 's|#unix_sock_group = "libvirt"|unix_sock_group = "libvirt"|' /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf
sudo sed -i 's|#unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"|unix_sock_rw_perms = "0770"|' /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf

sdd your user account to libvirt group

sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)
newgrp libvirt

start & enable libvirt daemon

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service
sudo systemctl status libvirtd.service

run the following

sudo virsh net-autostart default

reboot

run virtual machine manager (virt-manager)

Windows 11

sudo pacman -Syu swtpm edk2-ovmf

# Libtpms-based TPM emulator
tpm_path=~/Documents/windows11/
swtpm socket --tpm2 --tpmstate dir="${tpm_path}" --ctrl type=unixio,path="${tpm_path}/swtpm-sock" &
cp -f /usr/share/edk2/x64/OVMF_VARS.4m.fd ~/Documents/windows11/OVMF_VARS.4m.fd

https://johnsiu.com/blog/win-kvm/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks. Going to bookmark and save this. Appreciate the info