Could I, and how, run a virtual machine in a external disk?

[@R+5]

i know it might be a very noob question, and that there are a few pages with guides to make vm in linux, but since the problem im trying to solve is not exactly that, those guides dont help me much since i have experimented very little with vm and ignore how to properly set things up.

im currently dual booting ubuntu 16.04.5 and windows 8 in a ssd, but i would like to avoid having to switch back and forth just for a few programs (which also dont need much disk space). i dont have much space left for installing new things in the ssd, but i have another small ssd which i would like to use as an external disk to run a virtual machine from ubuntu, so i could use the other programs that only work in windows in it, and maybe a windows only game (that isnt working with steamplay).

[psymin]

If your external SSD is connected through USB 3, there might be enough I/O to not cause noticeable throughput issues. So that part might work okay.

If the games you're trying to play don't work well with Proton (Steam Play) then I believe it is likely that getting them to run well in a virtual machine on linux will be tricky.

VirtualBox has some Guest Additions that help facilitate 3D accelerated graphics in a virtualized environment, but it is far from ideal and won't work well (if at all) for many new games.

That is probably the path of least resistance. VirtualBox guest images stored on a USB 3.0 external SSD.

If a game will play well on VirtualBox, it is also likely to play adequately on Proton.

If a game won't play well on VirtualBox, then dual-booting is probably the best solution.

Otherwise I might suggest looking into PCI-Passthrough, IOMMU and all that stuff with QEMU. That environment is difficult to set up, unfortunately.

[@R+5]

thanks.

the game is tales of berseria, and the demo did run with proton, but the full version did not; i found in youtube someone that was able to run it with wine, so i think i may have a chance at running it that way, but if it could run ok with a vm, then maybe that would be also an option (is it possible to install with wine a new program in an external drive? ie outside /home).

The other programs i would like to run with in the vm would be an audio program and others i have in steam, and probably some non-steam programs that are only for windows (rather than using wine + steam, unless i could find a way to configure it properly to run games and programs from the external drive so maybe, even if i still had to switch back to windows, would be less frequently).

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by @R+5:

thanks.

the game is tales of berseria, and the demo did run with proton, but the full version did not; i found in youtube someone that was able to run it with wine, so i think i may have a chance at running it that way, but if it could run ok with a vm, then maybe that would be also an option (is it possible to install with wine a new program in an external drive? ie outside /home).

The other programs i would like to run with in the vm would be an audio program and others i have in steam, and probably some non-steam programs that are only for windows (rather than using wine + steam, unless i could find a way to configure it properly to run games and programs from the external drive so maybe, even if i still had to switch back to windows, would be less frequently).

Some of the games in the Tales series have very tight DRM that causes issues with the particular version of Wine in Proton.

[SIGKILL]

Originally posted by @R+5:

i know it might be a very noob question, and that there are a few pages with guides to make vm in linux, but since the problem im trying to solve is not exactly that, those guides dont help me much since i have experimented very little with vm and ignore how to properly set things up.

im currently dual booting ubuntu 16.04.5 and windows 8 in a ssd, but i would like to avoid having to switch back and forth just for a few programs (which also dont need much disk space). i dont have much space left for installing new things in the ssd, but i have another small ssd which i would like to use as an external disk to run a virtual machine from ubuntu, so i could use the other programs that only work in windows in it, and maybe a windows only game (that isnt working with steamplay).

To answer your question simply without going into alternatives or too many caveats:

VMs such as VirtualBox abstract the the client filesystem into a single file rather than directly utilizing the hardware or dumping files all over the host filesystem. All you would need to do is specify the location of the virtual disk image file as being located on a mounted external drive.

In this case you would want to format the external ssd as ext4 and mount it somewhere (FUSE can do this for you or you can semi-permanently mount it to any directory you want in your filesystem) via manual mount command or fstab. When you create your Virtual Machine, just specifiy the location of the VDI to your external ssd. You can also move a previously created VDI to the external storage, but you'll need to update the VM and (and the storage registry, depending on which VM software you're using) to know where it is.

Keep in mind, however, that if you're using a USB external drive to run an OS, there may be a significant performance impact.

[SIGKILL]

Originally posted by @R+5:

thanks.

the game is tales of berseria, and the demo did run with proton, but the full version did not; i found in youtube someone that was able to run it with wine, so i think i may have a chance at running it that way, but if it could run ok with a vm, then maybe that would be also an option

Gaming performance under VMs suck. Thats just the nature of the beast since you're foregoing direct total hardware access from the client. If Wine / Proton works at all, thats the better option.

is it possible to install with wine a new program in an external drive? ie outside /home.

Sound like there are two questions here. For those coming from windows this can be a bit confusing to many. A partition on any hardware or virtual device can be mounted to any directory on linux.

For example: you could mount a partition from another drive to /home/somedude/games or /mnt/external-ssd or /media/username/. It's not uncommon to have /home mounted from a different drive than the rest of the filesystem. You could move your entire steam installation to another physical drive and mount that drive/partition at a directory called /home/username/.steam and Steam itself would never know the difference. The same goes, of course, for Wine.

With Wine, you have what are called prefixes, which represent a base directory for a windows directory tree with some Wine config files at the bottom. You can create as many of these as you want, and put them anywhere you wish. This is useful since you may want to configure some apps/games with specific settings or tweaks that you dont want applied to others.

example: > WINEPREFIX=/home/userguy/external-ssd/wine/SomeGamePrefix wine cmd

If you specify a wine prefix location that doesn't exist, Wine creates a new one at that location for you. You can use Lutris or PlayOnLinux to do this stuff for you via GUI if you prefer.

The other programs i would like to run with in the vm would be an audio program and others i have in steam, and probably some non-steam programs that are only for windows (rather than using wine + steam, unless i could find a way to configure it properly to run games.

I use Wine for just about everything windows-related nowadays. The only thing I use windows VMs anymore are just quarantine zones for poking at nasty malware lol. "Wine + Steam" situations have been pretty well superceded by Proton imo.