I run my entire work computer inside of a VM. I work from home and have a powerfull desktop i use for my private stuff hooked up to my 3 monitors. My work pc is a vmware vm running inside of vmware pro. I can minimize the work vm and work it out my sight or I can selective choose that the vm should use 1, 2 or 3 monitors and it is easy to switch back and forth between work and private without have any work related data on my private desktop. The work vm is domain joined, o365 enterprise joined and loocked down in ridicilous ways by cooperate IT but now i can run that from my private powerfull PC without worring that corp IT messes up my private computer.
I was thinking of doing something similar, especially since work mostly insists on running Windows. Do you use conferencing software or such from the VM? If so, how's the performance?
I started working from home around 12 years ago and have been using this setup in various incarnations. I experience zero issues related to running work from inside of a VM. I work for an MS Shop, so we are using teams.
The main issue with my setup is that VMware or Windows 11 (my host OS) can't use the GPU when rendering the UI of the VM (I'm not sure if VMware or MS is to be blamed or both) despite having a discrete GPU card installed.
The rendering of the image must all be done by the CPU, which requires a lot of RAM.
After switching to 3 x 4K monitors, the VM requires 62GB of RAM to be able to run on full screen on all monitors (63720 MB to be precise). I recall that I somehow managed to get it working while "only" using around 32GB, but it became unstable. 62GB is the sweet spot where everything runs smoothly. Haven't tried to adjust the settings in years. It was a pain to get working in the first place with 4k monitors, and since I have 256 GB installed, I just left the settings as they are.
At next motherboard upgrade I might revisit, but I think that VmWare still can't take advantages of the host GPU in this regard so I expect the RAM requirement to stay.
Some computer problems can be solved by throwing hardware at it. This is one of those. Give VMware and Windows an obscene amount of RAM, and you can have Teams running smoothly and flawlessly inside a VM on a Windows Client Host in 4K.
Weird, I pass through a dGPU for work VM sometimes on Win10/11 @ 2K without much memory usage except I don't use MSTeams but it doesn't surprise me that it needs 60GB RAM nowadays.
I'm jealous of your system's 256GB, my memory controller looks to max at 128GB but it's kinda old now (DDR4).
As I understand it, when connecting to the vm through the VMware console viewer, since the desktop image of the remote computer is rendered within a VMware process, which is CPU-bound, only the CPU can handle this task.
Spanning multiple 4K monitors demands significant RAM to handle the large aggregate framebuffer size and the associated overhead for rendering and display synchronization.
I did the same thing for many months running teams. It was about what you expect from teams. I didn’t have any other significant issues, but eventually stopped using this setup due to increasing security requirements of the VPN software.
