Hello
Has someone been able to run Virtual Machines in a VPS in the past or actually with a decent and stable performance in the VM?
A VPS like for example a Contabo VPS service that I see their service is reliable with a good price, starting in $7/month including 4 vCPU cores, 8 GB RAM and 50 GB NMVe SSD:
Well, I have a Windows 10 workspace in a Virtual Machine running in VMware Workstation Pro 15, and I need to migrate that workspace to a VPS (reasons below), but as a VPS is already in itself a virtualized environment, I would like to know about the experience of others users in this kind of situations where the case requires to use a VPS and running a virtual machine on it. So please let’s base the answers about the VPS is a needed and fixed part of the situation.
I would like to ask about this situation here before to migrate, to know about VM system stability when running in a VPS, about possible system crushes, lags, or for example high hardware/OS performance degradation, etc.
In my case the Windows 10 workspace takes in total around 2.1-2.5GB of RAM and 11%-20% from a 2-cores vCPU taken from a quad-core i7-6thGen-@2.6GHz (in a local laptop), so it is not a heavy process and as the VPS would have 4 vCPU cores, 8 GB RAM and 50 GB NMVe SSD, I’ve thought these VPS specs could bear a VMware Workstation Player 16 installation maybe choosing a Linux OS for the VPS like Ubuntu 20.04 (Windows for the VPS OS has around double monthly price), and with this then running the Virtualized Windows 10 workspace in that VPS.
About why to use a VPS, this is just because the next 2 reasons:
Important details:
I really hope someone here could have a similar situation and can share the experience.
Thank you very much in advance
Very likely Contabo VPS itself is already a VM. In effect you would be running Workstation in a nested virtualisation.
Contabo VPS -> the subscribed Ubuntu 20.04 hosting VMware Workstation/Player -> your Windows VM.
Question is what is the virtualisation service used by Contabo (Hyper-V or ESXi or some other???). Do they allow nested virtualisation? Most hypervisors require explicit enabling of nested virtualisation? Example, Workstation Pro/Player in CPU settings "Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI" is a switch to allow running VMs within a Workstation VM. How many levels deep are you already in at the Ubuntu level? If they don't allow nested virtualisation, this endeavour of yours cannot get off the ground.
For Workstation Pro/Player to work under a non-VMware hypervisor, the /etc/vmware/config file in the Ubuntu VPS needs to have the following line (after you install the VMware Workstation Pro/Player software).
vmx.allowNested = "TRUE"
As for nested virtualisation performance, ideally, the CPU (or virtual CPU) should be Intel Haswell or newer which has the VMCS Shadowing feature. AFAIK, this feature can only be brought to the first VM level (at least with Workstation that seems to be the case). I don't think VMCS Shadowing feature is available in AMD CPUs. So another question to Contabo would be what CPUs/vCPUs would the Ubuntu VPS get?
Maybe you should ask Contabo if they can let you have a short trial period first before paying for/commiting to any subscription.
This is an old thread https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Running-a-VM-on-a-VM-Paperspace/m-p/935165 using another VPS. I suggest just read that thread and don't do a necropost on that thread. If you want, maybe send a DM to the OP of that thread and ask about his/her Paperspace experience. But it looks like Paperspace is now more focused on ML on GPUs as a cloud service.
Hi,
Please don't post duplicate threads..it makes it very difficult to follow progress.
Normally I remove this, but as there's a reply already I will instead lock the thread.
Continue the discussion in this thread:
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Player/IDEA-VMware-Player-in-a-Linux-VPS-as-bac...
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Wil