A few days ago I was driving home and wondering if there was any solution out there that presented a light weight hypervisor installed and hosted VMs, but which allowed you to work on the VMs locally. Say I could setup and run on my laptop a small network of computers for rapid proof-of-concept, something I've done with network emulators like CORE (https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Our-Work/Areas-of-Research/Information-Technology/NCS/CORE/).

I'd looked at Qubes OS as a possibility, and while I really like a lot about the thoughts to security that had been built in from the start, the architecture of how it was setup didn't easily lend itself to my use case. But, I did take a bit of inspiration from it. I run Proxmox at home on my smallish cluster

So, laptop in hand, I started to see what I could do in this regard. It has been very helpful for me, and I thought I'd throw this out there in case anyone else was looking for something similar.

Initial Reading: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Developer_Workstations_with_Proxmox_VE_and_X11

This was honestly most of it. I did add Remmina to the apt-getcommand ending with

apt-get install xfce4 chromium lightdm remmina remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-secret

Once rebooted, I was presented with a bog standard Debian xfce4login screen. Used the user I'd setup per the Proxmox instructions. Set Chromium to open default to the Proxmox management page. That was all deceptively easy. The only "issue" I've had was that the login screen elements were incredibly small (4k display on the laptop) but once logged in, everything worked well with HiDPI.

Next was VM environment.

Setup a OPNSense VM first. Attached the vmbr0 as the WAN and setup a few internal bridges to use as DMZ, Client VM, and Server VMs. I also tested setting up a vmbr for the Internal WiFi that I could selectively use and bring up as needed and it worked (set it up as a second WAN in OPNSense) and also tested passing it directly to a Windows VM which worked well.

After that comes any test VMs. I setup a Windows Server 2016 VM, a Windows 10 Enterprise VM, a RockyLinux VM and a DragonOS Focal VM (for SDR use). I'd setup internal network cards on the VMs to attach through the OPNSense VM, but usually added in a second NIC on vmbr0 with which I could use Remmina for easy quick RDP and VNC. I'm going back later to test out using Spice instead. Using the web console worked plenty well enough to install the VMs easily though.

Anway, using this setup I was able, at home to quickly mock up problems and networks without affecting my personal homelab, carrying no more hardware than my laptop. Mocked up a DC and a couple of client computers, all running simultaneously and with decent enough performance. It worked well enough that I'm not carrying the separate NUC anymore. May not be the normal use of Proxmox, but wanted to relay my experience with it as a mobile system.