Virtualisation

Currently, ShinySpace runs on Proxmox. Proxmox is a very handy tool to manage large numbers of virtual machines. The web-UI allows a quick overview of resource usage, and makes moving around VM's easy. 

To be specific, ShinySpace uses Proxmox Virtual Environment - an open source Linux "distribution" based on Debian. It's free to use, but the free version comes with a slightly annoying popup on logging in (which can be disabled) and uses the "unstable/testing" repositories. For a bigger environment with more mission-critical services, the enterprise license is recommended, and actually very affordable at around $100 a year.

Proxmox also comes with qemu, which includes a nice command-line interface for creating and configuring VMs. This CLI is used by Ansible to quickly create new VMs.

The hardware Proxmox runs on is an old gaming PC - the GPU was removed to save power, and with time some more RAM and a good SSD for the virtual machines was added.