As an example I run opencode and anything related agent-related in its own dedicated KVM VM with its own LVM logical volumes for storage on a headless server. This has no access whatsoever to the personal data that lives on my laptop and workstation desktop PC. The VM gets periodically imaged and backed up, and is relatively easy to move between host machines if I need to.
One benefit of doing this is that I can leave it doing long term slow things with slow but capable LLMs on a truly 24x7 basis without worrying about it being interrupted by a laptop being closed/going to sleep, or workstation level software updates/reboots on my primary desktop PC.
Thanks for sharing this - I've been trying to do something similar but have not had success. Can you say a bit more about the details? What is your headless server running (Ubuntu Server?), how do you connect, how did you set up the KVM VM, how do you move it if necessary, etc? Thanks!
In my case it's a fairly boring proxmox server. The KVM VM started as a bare bones debian install and then I added xorg and xfce4 and the tiger vnc server. I have a GUI on it for when I want to use it that way (in screen dimensions that are a 1:1 mapping of the native resolution of my laptop for full screen VNC session), or of course I also talk to it by regular SSH session, and screen or tmux. The VNC server listens on 127.0.0.1:5901 and then I use SSH port forwarding from my workstation machine to connect the macos tigervnc client.
For people who don't want to do it with proxmox you can also do the same with manual KVM command line tools (virsh, etc) with no GUI. Or as something like a Xen dom0 running the guest as a xen HVM or PVH guest. Lots of ways to do it.
If I need to move it I can shutdown the VM and take an image of its LVM logical volume storage device (by something as rudimentary as like dd into an xz file), move the file, then create a new identically sized logical volume and do the reverse using dd to write from the file into the LVM logical volume location on the destination.
Edit: It would also be possible to do this all in one machine by something as basic as running virtualbox on your laptop, make a disk image file, installing the VM in that, give it bridge mode access to the physical network adapter to get its own DHCP lease in your same LAN segment, and treat it as a logically separate computer. There's minor risks of theoretical hypervisor escapes from the VM on the same machine, but such things tend to get patched fairly quick.
One benefit of doing this is that I can leave it doing long term slow things with slow but capable LLMs on a truly 24x7 basis without worrying about it being interrupted by a laptop being closed/going to sleep, or workstation level software updates/reboots on my primary desktop PC.