QNAP NAS Community Forum

You ask the wrong way around .. how do WE know if YOU need VM's ? .. What do you want to do with the VM ?

Remember, you have a very low power NAS, so take that into account before bogging in down with GUI VM's

my first foray into vms is to install windows 10 OS vm. so i can test out apps to check them out. If they are dodgy i'll just wipe the vm and that's that. Simple. It's a way of testing things out BEFORE committing to a production client device.

I also used it to try out Linux OS before commiting to it as a permanent solution.

At one point i even use the VM on QNAP to be my internet router to try out pfsense. After a few months using this, i later opted for a bare metal NUC for my permanent router using pfsense, it was a Qotom which had decent specs for the price.

Other people use VM long term. You can ask them what use cases they have for that. But yes, VMs are very useful :} QNAP virtualization Station makes it easy to setup. Refer to youtube guides in regards to how to do that. It's less than 10 seconds to search "qnap vm setup"


i see you have 16gb ram, that's a good place to start from. As for CPU, it's ok for starting out. But eventually if you require more cpu threads, then the AMD ryzen is a good candidate for running even more vms, since it has more threads to split around

My question is: Do i need a VM?

That's for you to answer

I mean, what benefits does it have?

but i see that you lack the understanding for what benefits vm provides. I offered SOME case scenarios that i've tried myself. maybe others can elaborate OTHER different usage cases for it. And from that you can decide if that is worth your effort and time.


Personally i like to tinker around, and VMs are a VERY convenient way to tinker and be able to reset to the last stable SNAPSHOT in case something bad happens.

Forgot to mention snapshots. VM snapshots you can save points in time for VMs. for example i first install Windows 10 OS, so i save a snapshot if this pristine state. later i install all sorts of dodgy apps, at this point the VM is all messed up. But no problem because i Revert back to the pristine saved snapshot and walah, all good again. This is how convenient vm snapshots are I even used snapshots to create backups of my pfsense VM running on the QNAP last time. It was very useful (for the record, i ALSO saved the pfsense config as well, just in case).

by the way, if you are not too technically savvy, i suggest you keep your VMs OFFLINE. like do not portforward your VM, NAS, router etc. You can learn your VMs on the LAN. and once you are an expert you can then expand from that, just do it in a safe way like VPN or plex. Personally i don't need any remote access, so i never open up my network unless there is some important reason for it ;_;