Using a VM for work programs and VPN

[Deuteronomy93]

Hi All

 

So I've been thinking about using a VM for my work to try and separate out my work and personal life, and maybe even improve certain work aspects. I wondered what your experience of this is.

 

I live in China so I'm constantly switching my VPN on and off, changing the locations etc which can impact other things I have open. I have tried split tunnelling but it just never seems to end up working for extended periods.

 

I also dislike the fact that I can be using the same browser for home and work things and needs to prepare my screen further in advance to keep personal things and bookmarks hidden.

 

Overall I think the split is probably my best bet at achieving a separation and was going to use something like Virtualbox. I just did some research on enabling things like webcam and mic etc in Virtualbox which worked but saw that the quality was quite choppy, do you find it to have quite high latency or is this more just an issue where the demonstrator didn't allocate many system resources?

 

Do you experience any complications or note any quirks etc when using a VPN with a VM?

 

My computer's specs are in my profile, but basic info is: 16 cores, 64GB ram, 3 SSDs, 2080 GPU. I was thinking of splitting resources evenly as when I work I don't really need as much horsepower for personal things.

 

If I need the full computational power of the PC, I don't mind storing files on a shared drive and turning off the VM as I have some scripts to open specific applications up based on what I am doing, but is there a better way to achieve this? I saw that pausing a VM will free up CPU but still require RAM, this still could be fine as the RAM usage shouldn't typically be an issue.

 

Many thanks in advance!

[WereCatf]

22 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

Do you experience any complications or note any quirks etc when using a VPN with a VM?

Nope.

22 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

I just did some research on enabling things like webcam and mic etc in Virtualbox which worked but saw that the quality was quite choppy, do you find it to have quite high latency or is this more just an issue where the demonstrator didn't allocate many system resources?

It might simply be Virtualbox itself which causes things to run rather slow. I don't use Virtualbox myself as I use VMware instead, but under VMware all USB-devices work just the same as they would on the host, with no choppiness or the likes.

 

Give VMware a try and see if it works better?

[AMD A10-9600P]

27 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Nope.

It might simply be Virtualbox itself which causes things to run rather slow. I don't use Virtualbox myself as I use VMware instead, but under VMware all USB-devices work just the same as they would on the host, with no choppiness or the likes.

 

Give VMware a try and see if it works better?

Agreed, VMWare is a much better option. VirtualBox has always been very laggy in my experience, but VMWare was generally great.