20 Ways to Use a Virtual Machine (and other ideas for your homelab)

virtual machines aren't something new they've been around for quite some time and while virtualization software hasn't really evolved all that much the software you run on a virtual machine has so when talking about virtualization you have options you can run it on your local machine or you can run it on the server so if you're thinking about running on your local machine you have options like VMware parallels VirtualBox QEMU KBM and the list goes on and on and on this is a good option for someone who doesn't have a dedicated machine that they can allocate just to virtualization but if you do have another machine you can allocate virtualization to you can run virtualization servers like ESXi QEMU proxmox ve XenServer and the list goes on and on and on so I've put together a list of things you can do on a virtual machine and here they are in no particular order hey welcome back so on techno Tim and today we're gonna talk about things you can do with a virtual machine as a reminder ice cream every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday so if you'd like to continue this conversation about virtual machines helping my stream I'd love to have you now I have 20 things on my list and organize them all into categories not all of them may apply to you but hopefully this sparks some ideas so that you can discover new things you can do with virtual machines so first up is learning a new OS maybe you're running Windows maybe a running Mac and you want to check out the Linux distribution you went out to DistroWatch org and you found some of the top distributions so maybe you want to check out pop OS Ubuntu Linux Mint Manjaro or any other Linux distribution you can very easily spin that up on the machine you're on now well unless it's a mobile device but you know what I'm saying but what if you want to discover old operating systems say go back to Windows 95 or Windows 98 or Windows 2000 and see what those are all about or maybe you want to learn about a whole entire environment and you can set that environment up in your own home network you could set up and virtualize a whole entire environment with virtualization you can set up Active Directory something like DNS or a mail server the list really goes on and on and on so I'd love to everything about learning into this first category okay number 2 home automation so home automation has been taking off the last couple of years maybe you don't want to use home kid or Google home or Alexa to control all your devices while home assistant is an open source answer to that so home assistant is a home automation platform then you can run within your network and all of your data stays there you can control things like lights garage doors or any number of IOT devices you have on your network it's definitely worth checking out if you're into own automation and another quick tip is if you're using home kit and your device isn't home kit certified you can check out something like home bridge home kit acts like a bridge from third-party devices to Apple devices so that they can communicate and you can add them to your home automation on your Apple device this is great for devices that aren't home kit certified okay number three run a web server running a web server at home is pretty easy maybe you want to run your personal blog with WordPress tor ghost or maybe you just want to spin up your own front end using angular react view or any other number of front-end technologies this is really simple with something like Apache or nginx but if you're just running a blog check out ghost or WordPress number four running your own API so maybe you have some data at home that you want to serve out over an API or maybe you're a software developer and just want to serve out some data this is very easy to do with nodejs Go Python PHP all you have to do is build your API and serve that out another idea is you could put an API gateway in front of that something like calm but either way this is something that virtual machines can handle very easily number five home security so building your own home security system at home is a lot easier than you think I've been doing it for years and I've been using something called blue iris so blue iris is piece of software that sits on my Windows virtual machine all of my cameras feed their video feed to it and then I can get alerts or record or view that video on the virtual machine or from an app one of the advantages to keeping this on your own home network is that I don't pay a subscription fee I bought the software and it runs on my virtual machine all of the data stays on my virtual machine and I don't have to send it to the cloud or pay a subscription fee but with that comes managing a little bit of complexity but I enjoy the complex if you're looking for open source or free alternatives that are quite a few out there something like zoom minder might work I'll be it I haven't checked it out yet okay number six entertainment now on bucketing a lot of things into the home entertainment category but most of them around personal streaming you can run something like a plex server and serve all of your personal videos to yourself flex it even has stuff like camera backup for your phone streaming music as well as streaming your own pictures to yourself been using plex for years I love plex it's a great service but if you're looking for open source alternatives there are things like cody and mb which pretty much do the same thing so number seven is network firewall or a virtual appliance firewall so this is a virtual firewall that protects all of your home network from the internet there are a lot of great options out there so pfSense is one of the most popular ones out there it's well supported very popular and very stable and has a lot of great features and there are lots of alternatives in this space you have things like untangle open sense even XG firewall by so close but really it's gonna be up to you to evaluate which one meets your needs and which ones gonna give you the protection you want at home a number 8 home network so this might be managing your home network on the other side of the firewall now there are a few players in this space the one that I use is unifying by ubiquity so I have a unifying access point and I use the software to manage monitor and deploy access points it gives me a lot of really good information about what's going on in my home network some of the best channels to use some of the noisy neighbors that have access points that are on the same channels as mine and if I were using more ubiquity Hardware I would get more features so if you're using unify or something similar having a virtual machine dedicated to your local network it's probably a good thing ok number 9 VPN servers I'm not talking about private VPN or ways to VPN or tunnel into private networks I'm talking about VPN ting into your home network when you're away so this is a great option when you're on a public network or even your phone's network day-to-day be panning back home to then tunnel back out gives you a little bit of peace of mind it can give you access to all of your resources at home say you need to remote into a machine at home so you need to print something at home or you just don't trust a network you're on building your own VPN server with something like open VPN is pretty easy to do but if you've opted in to number seven most of those come with VPNs so you kind of get two for one but if you have any virtual eyes your firewall or your home appliance router doesn't support it building a VPN server is a good option ok number 10 this is a huge category and it opens up a ton of possibilities running docker at home so running docker at home gives you a ton of possibilities some I've already mentioned a lot of the things I already mentioned could be containerized and if you want I might have a video on that later if so let me know in the comments below but if you really want a good orchestration framework for docker you can run something like kubernetes at home and if you want to manage that you can run something like Rancher so running Rancher at home to orchestrate kubernetes to then orchestrate docker containers is a really good option in a robust option to give you dock route number 11 a database server so maybe you're running some services at home and you need to store that in some kind of persistent storage a database server might be something for you sure you can run a database on your local machine putting that off on another virtual machine and not worrying about it seems to be a good option now there are all kinds of databases out there you have post grass sequel my sequel and really the list goes on and on and on but building a virtual machine and keeping your databases on that seems to be a good option so that you don't have to worry if you need to reformat or rebuild your own machine they're safe on another machine number 12 a file server now this could be anything it could be as simple as a Windows or Linux machine with Samba share setup or you could go all out and set up a free NAT server now I really enjoy free nez Irina has at home and I actually have a virtualized to freeness supports all my file server needs and I know that there are a lot of alternatives out there but I've kind of settled on freeing as hard a freenas I was just using a window share which accomplishes a lot of the same things but freenas gives me a lot more options so there are alternatives out there like open media vault which seems to be getting some traction but I've only used three now so that's the only one I can comment on number 13 ad blocking so you're probably familiar with things like ad blocking in Chrome or your browser extension but what if he could adblock your whole entire home well that's what pie-holes job is so you could set up a PI whole server at home use it as your DNS and it will block all ads for every device at home if you use this in combination with the VPN server I talked about you could even block them on the go so I've been running piehole at home for about a year now and it's great there's a little bit of setup you need to do for piehole but once you get it set up and running and fine-tune all of your block list you really start to understand which devices are trying to communicate with the outside world but setting it up on a virtual machine is something simply you can do in a couple of hours so 14 personal cloud so maybe you want access to your documents or your pictures on the go maybe you want to edit them maybe you want to share them and maybe you want a Google Drive like experience well that's exactly what next cloud does so I've used an ex cloud for quite some time just to share files but you can also use it for things like collaboration backing up your phone's pictures using it as a photo gallery or giving people access to your documents so if you want to keep your documents on-premise at home and you want a light alternative to Google Drive next cloud seems to fit that bill and if not there are many alternatives to next cloud this just seems to be one of the most popular ones all right number 15 FTP server now I know some of this was kind of covered in 14 but 14 I was really going after personal cloud where 15 it's kind of a public cloud but your own public cloud so FTP servers are still pretty popular this is a good option if you want to share large files we want to secure them you want to do it over SSL or you just like FTP clients is that a thing maybe so many of the use cases for an FTP server fit some of the other options I talked about but I want to call this out specifically because FTP servers are still around 16.6 16 reporting server now this might seem really boring but with the explosion of data indexing graphing and visualizing that data has become really awesome you got things like qivana or gravano that can help you visualize some of the data that you have this can help you analyze the data see trends or just give you some really pretty pictures to look at one way that I use Griffin is to measure my api's see the response time see the latency see how much bandwidth they're using but you might find a different uniform and you'd be surprised how many IOT devices support something like this with a little extra configuration okay 17 this is a touchy topic but a bucks no hear me out I'm not talking about Torrance were bad or piracy or anything like that I'm talking about a torrent server for legal reasons so distrowatch you know the Linux distribution site I mentioned earlier has torrents for many Linux distributions so if you want to download one using a torrent or you want to help seed and give the next person Linux building a torrent server is a good option for a virtual machine 18 backup server now I'm lumping a few things into a backup server one is the traditional backup where you actually backup items to the server another synchronization so if you want to backup other systems on your network something like your backup is a good option it's it's open source or you could use a commercial product like Backblaze but having a dedicated machine there to either be the target of backups or backing up to the cloud it's a really good idea and a good option for a virtual machine now if you want to sync things or make things available you have things like dupe okatee or same thing that allows you to sync data from other machines down to that server now I know those aren't true backup solutions but it is making those files available on multiple machines so you have copies of them but either way backing up your data or making your data available on more machines is a pretty good idea for disaster recovery so if you got space on a virtual machine you should probably set up a backup server to backup some of your data 19 now this is another big one but game server I'm calling a lumping game server and game playing into one but if you want to run a traditional game server on a virtual machine this is a great option you can run something like a minecraft server on your virtual machine and keep it off your main machine that way it's dedicated it's always on and you don't have to worry about when you reformat your machines now the other half of that is just gaming in general now this does take a lot of extra configuration to get working and some specialized hardware but you can actually game on a remote machine I have a video where I set up remote gaming on a machine using something called proxmox again it took specialized hardware and a little bit of know-how but a documented dental entire process so also lumping into the game server or gaming is taking advantage of that video card so if you can take advantage of that video card you can do some more gaming in home using something like steam in-home streaming you could stream your whole entire steam collection to any screen in your home using steam in-home streaming you could stream your game collection to your TV your Apple TV or another PC on your network and lumping in a video card into this category opens up many many more possibilities but again it's very specialized so I didn't want to go into all the use cases so let's just keep it at that and last but not least number 20 crowd sourcing research so something like folding at home has been around quite a long time but it's getting a ton of popularity over the last couple of months so folding at home allows you to download jobs from their servers process those jobs and upload them back to their servers all the help find cures for diseases now this is crowd-sourced because everyone pulls down a job everyone works on that job individually and then everyone uploads the results to them this is a really good job for a virtual machine because it can be on 24/7 and if you have a virtual server you don't have to worry about it impacting your local machine although you could configure the service to run when your PCs idle this ensures that it won't impact anything you're doing on this machine right here so if you want to contribute some of your cycles and some of your power to something like folding at home a virtual machine is a great option for that okay so there you have it so was that 20 21 19 I think he was 20 now I'm sure there are things that I missed in this video I'm sure you have lots of great ideas out there too if you have some ideas or know of things that I missed please please please write them in the comment section below I'd love to hear your ideas because I have a lot of room on my virtual server and I love adding new services and while you're down there adding ideas in the comments don't forget to hit that subscribe button and if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you didn't it's totally fine you can hit the thumbs down too and just as a reminder I stream every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday so if you have a question about this video or any other video hop in my stream and I'd be glad to help you out so thanks so much for watching and as always stream on my friends [Music]

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 173,897

Keywords: ways to use a virtual machine, ideas for a virtual machine, ideas for homelab, vm, virtual machine, virtual server, ideas, virtualization, distrowatch, ubuntu, home assistant, homebridge, wordpress, kong, blue iris, zoneminder, plex, unify, ubiquiti, openvpn, rancher, docker, kubernetes, k8s, freenas, pihole, pi-hole, nextcloud, filezilla, grafana, backblaze, urbackup, minecraft, steam remote play, folding at home, server, homelab, technotim, fah, server ideas, open source, selfhosted, self hosted, pfsense

Id: SVQmzaSabEQ

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020