Recommended setup for a "hom dev cloud"? I want to run VM's on an old desktop basically

Question

I develop on my laptop, and usually spin up VM's on virtualbox on my laptop using vagrant. I'm trying to figure out a way to have these VM's run on an old physical machine that I'm trying to repurpose as a home server

• Ideally the VM's would be accessible directly on my home network (& potentially opened up to the internet)
• Although i'm not a vagrant expert, i'd like to be able to just stay vagrant up --provider=whatever and have the VM be spun up on my 'dev server'
• i'd like to be able to do snapshots and all the magic stuff that virtualbox/vmware provides
• it would seem that having as minimal a host OS as possible would be smart. A hypervisor?
• i'd love for this to 'just work', and not be something that needs lots of care and feeding

I'm not even sure what types of things I need to research / figure out for this to work. I tried going through the install process for openstack (devstack.org), but even though it worked it didn't seem to give me everything I needed (snapshots?)

Is there a recommended setup here? What kind of software do I even need to reasearch?

Answer 1

Check out VMware Hypervisor.

http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/vsphere-hypervisor/

Installs on pretty much everything and is the backbone to enterprise level infrastructures. It gives you the ability to have it private/internet access (depends on how you configure you firewall). Its fairly simple to setup, all you need is a machine with a NIC that it recognises. It does allow for snapshots, some free backup tools also available. Its extremely small and can install on USB or SD Card. It does just work - even old versions will live on for a very long time.