05-09-2019, 04:34 PM
I have been very busy the last one or two weeks due to my final exam for my IT specialist diploma. During that time I have visited the site without logging in when I had time, though. I have seen this thread but had no chance to reply as it was closed rather quickly and I had more important preparations to do. Well, luckly the exam is over now.
A little something I wanted to add to the topic as additional information or maybe also as an answer to the question in the thread can be found below.
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The easy way:
If the VPS that the user has is a) based on KVM and b) the user has access to the control panel with c) the ability to mount a ISO, they can install two or more operating systems (depending on the available disk space) as easy as it is possible on a normal computer or server. Through the installer the user can partition the HDD and leave space for a second or third operating system. First Windows and then Linux (to avoid the bootloader brick that Windows will cause when it is installed after Linux). Of course you cannot boot into both operating systems at once. You can only use one at the same time and would need to reboot the VPS and boot into the other one through the boot manager/loader when you want to change OSs. This way the network of the VPS will have no conflicts and there won't be any other conflicting issues (well, unless you break the partitions by messing around with them).
The hard way:
If the user wants to run two or more operating systems at the same time: the solution is virtualization inside virtualization. You can install KVM inside KVM (or other virtualization technologies) and create further VMs inside your VPS. In this case you will have conflicts with the network as you mostly have only a single IPv4 IP address. You would have to setup a complex NAT network on the VPS and forward ports to the VMs if you want host applications and such things. This is absolutely nothing for beginners and people who lack advanced knowledge about Linux, its firewalls and networking (NAT, port forwarding, routing). And remember that in most cases the providers will not allow such experiments. The performance won't be a dream either. This method has no real plus points unless you install OpenVZ inside the KVM container (this will have zero impact on performance as OpenVZ containers are software isolated containers without any real virtualization).
---
Well, that's just it .
A little something I wanted to add to the topic as additional information or maybe also as an answer to the question in the thread can be found below.
---
The easy way:
If the VPS that the user has is a) based on KVM and b) the user has access to the control panel with c) the ability to mount a ISO, they can install two or more operating systems (depending on the available disk space) as easy as it is possible on a normal computer or server. Through the installer the user can partition the HDD and leave space for a second or third operating system. First Windows and then Linux (to avoid the bootloader brick that Windows will cause when it is installed after Linux). Of course you cannot boot into both operating systems at once. You can only use one at the same time and would need to reboot the VPS and boot into the other one through the boot manager/loader when you want to change OSs. This way the network of the VPS will have no conflicts and there won't be any other conflicting issues (well, unless you break the partitions by messing around with them).
The hard way:
If the user wants to run two or more operating systems at the same time: the solution is virtualization inside virtualization. You can install KVM inside KVM (or other virtualization technologies) and create further VMs inside your VPS. In this case you will have conflicts with the network as you mostly have only a single IPv4 IP address. You would have to setup a complex NAT network on the VPS and forward ports to the VMs if you want host applications and such things. This is absolutely nothing for beginners and people who lack advanced knowledge about Linux, its firewalls and networking (NAT, port forwarding, routing). And remember that in most cases the providers will not allow such experiments. The performance won't be a dream either. This method has no real plus points unless you install OpenVZ inside the KVM container (this will have zero impact on performance as OpenVZ containers are software isolated containers without any real virtualization).
---
Well, that's just it .