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Remote SSH into an Ubuntu VM on Windows

Andrew (he/him) on November 01, 2018

We recently got a new Windows Server machine at work and I wanted to install an Ubuntu VM within it. After a few tries, I managed to install everyt...
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Andrew (he/him) • • Edited

While I agree generally with your sentiment, I'd still prefer a full distro over "reverse Wine". From Wiki:

This subsystem is not capable of running all Linux software, such as 32-bit binaries, or those that require specific Linux kernel services not implemented in WSL. Since there is no "real" Linux kernel in WSL, kernel modules, such as device drivers, for Linux can't be run.

It is possible to run some graphical (GUI) applications (such as Mozilla Firefox) by installing an X11 server within the Windows (host) environment (such as VcXsrv or Xming), although not without caveats, such as the lack of audio support or hardware acceleration (resulting in poor graphics performance). Support for OpenCL and CUDA is also not being implemented currently, although planned for future releases.

That said, Microsoft explicitly states that WSL is oriented to the development of applications, and not for desktop environment or production servers, recommending the use of virtual machines (Hyper-V or Kubernetes) and Azure for those purposes.

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André Sékou (Mapy) •

Bien dit Andrew!

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Andrew (he/him) • • Edited

Wasting resources isn't much of a concern when you have 1-3 people using 384GB RAM, 4TB SSD storage and two Xeon Gold 6154 processors. I'd rather have a full Linux distro than have to deal with whatever limitations come along with WSL. It's definitely something to look into, though.

We have Windows Server 2016 and I think it's on there.