In my humble opinion, installing Unraid provides the easiest scaffolding for VM's and dockers.
Unraid provides a web-based interface for interacting with the server, including configuring drive storage,
users, dockers, VM's, shares, and apps. But there's no requirement to configure any storage - all you need is one
hard disk to tinker with. Unraid also includes a 30-day trial... meaning you could download, fire it up, and
try a Windows VM or a docker.
Unraid provides thousands (1889) of pre-built dockers, including
Blue Iris, Frigate, Zoneminder
, Shinobi, etc.
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All the VM functionality is straightforward with templates for these Operating Systems:
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I currently have five VM's configured, for example (including a Windows 10 instance):
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The VM's are configured using Unraid's web interface (here's part of the config for my Debian MQTT Server):
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And Unraid is built on Slackware, so you can always SSH in and use the command line.
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Anyway, something to think about.