My work-from-home workstation always has a VM or two running the test/dev environment for the tasks I’m working on at work. They are VBox instances provisioned/managed by Vagrant.

They are CentOS7 instances, each running a test database, usually a text editor, “tail -F” monitoring log output, and various daemons/services specific to my workplace’s internal infrastructure. The host system is running Slackware 15.0.

On one hand, I think VMs are overused, introduce undue complexity, and reduce visibility.

On the other hand, the problem you’re citing doesn’t actually exist (at least not on Linux, dunno about Windows). A VM can use all of the host’s memory and processing power if the other VMs on the system aren’t using them. An operating system will balance resource utilization across multiple VMs the same as it does across processes to maximize the performance of each.

I just have a cron job that runs “ifconfig | logger” once a week. When I want to know how much data has been sent or received, I subtract the RX bytes or TX bytes from the appropriately timestamped entries and divide by the time difference. Easy-peasy.