Discussion

Apart from the docker containers we see a need for virtual machines as well. In fact to be able to use TLJH we employ a Linux Container (LXC). This is because for technical reasons TLJH cannot be dockerised due to dependency on systemd.

For legacy application and alternate operating systems it is smart to be able to use virtual machines. It also makes deploying and roll-out very flexible. There are several techniques available to us that are good to use for different reasons.

As an example one would like to use ArcGIS for Windows. In that case you need to have a virtual machine windows guest available. ArcGIS would benefit from GPU passthrough so that option should be available (https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/pcipassthrough.html).

Choices to consider:

• VirtualBox (by Oracle)
• KVM/Qemu/Quickemu
• GnomeBoxes/VirtualManager
• Xen

KVM/Qemu based is preferred because of speed and robustness. A test with Quickemu was performed and show that it can be extremely easy to setup a virtualmachine with a Windows guest. However the Quickemu approach creates a NAT-ed userspace instance which is isolated and very difficult to access. It is possible to fix this but still needs some investigation.