You can definitely run VMs or containers on your desktop system and there are a lot of ways to do that (as others have said). If it’s the automated, reproducible setup you’re after (and you are purposely avoiding docker), give a look to terraform and ansible to create and provision your software.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
9 points (100.0% liked)
homelab
8453 readers
13 users here now
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Can terraform (or OpenTofu) be used to create local VMs as well? I always thought it was just for popular cloud infrastructure like Digital Ocean or Google Cloud.
I’ve only ever tinkered with it slightly on a Proxmox host, but I ran it locally when I was testing it and it was glad to setup the VMs on the same system it was on.
Dude, that's super cool!
I'm not sure what your regular OS is but on Linux you can also use Qemu/Kvm to run virtual machines, or docker/podman for containers. You can also look into Virtual Box for a more finished interface. If you want to have something that behaves like the cloud you could also try Incus.
On windows : HyperV or Virtual Box for vms, you can also use Docker Desktop or Podman desktop. I think wsl also let you run services.
Qemu would be awesome. But I'm looking for more of an orchestrator. I'm on Arch Linux. Incus looks awesome! https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
Why do you want a full VM and not something lighter weight and easier like Docker?
Better security and separation of my personal files.
For #2 you just need to be smart about which file system paths you map to the container.
Do you really want to have guest OSs to think about?
Actually I don't really want guest OSs to think about. Solid point.
Before Docker took off we’d use Vagrant files and Ansible for provisioning VMs locally.
Can Vagrant be used for production? Or is there another orchestrator for it for clients or me to quickly provision stuff?