Do many folk run their astro labs / PC control software on a VM or bare metal?

[g__day]

Pondering something a few uber tech folk have suggested to me in the past - setting up an astro lab PC is a tad tricky and time involved - and every know and then they die and you go through it all again and again - why not just set up a VM image and run it on anything...

Having played with VMs a little bit know - wow that suggestion makes some sense. I wonder if any / many folk have tried this and what experiences you have gained?

[AstroViking]

I would NOT head down the path of using a VM for my astro-control computer.

Why? Because you're relying on the VM software's support for all connections to the physical devices you are controlling. If there's a glitch in the (for example) USB pass-through, then there goes your USB connections.

There's also the additional hardware requirements to run the VM. Not that much of an issue these days, but if your hardware is a few years old then it may struggle.

Best option (IMHO) is a bare-metal machine and to take a bit-for-bit snapshot of the hard drive and store it somewhere safe. There are tools around that can do this for pretty much every OS out there.

Many years ago we used Norton 'Ghost' for imaging PCs, and for macOS there's 'SuperDuper' or 'CarbonCopyCloner'. Linux also has similar tools and the ever reliable 'dd' from the command line.

Cheers,
V

[dikman]

That was my first thought too - set up the software on your PC and then make a backup copy of the whole drive. I remember using Ghost all those years ago, but as you say there are now others around (and often free).

Or an ISO image to a DVD.