Appendix A — Windows Workstation Notes
Under some circumstances you may be tied to Windows Desktop for a workstation. For example if you must use this OS on work-issued hardware such as a laptop. This is less than ideal, but a lot of enterprise companies default to Windows (or sometimes MacOS) as the only supported OS and will issue you hardware with it pre-installed, security hardened, and you won’t be allowed administrator privileges.
In these circumstances I still recommend acquiring some affordable hardware that is Linux-compatible for a Linux-based Workstation. A lot of PC desktop and laptop hardware is Linux-compatible. You should be able to look up if any hardware that you find will run Linux. Buying second-hand used hardware that’s a few years old is often a great way to acquire hardware to run Linux on a budget. Ebay can be great for this and you can probably find a laptop or PC that’s a few years old for a few hundred bucks (dollars US) at most. ThinkPad laptops are famously rather rugged and Linux-compatible even over a decade-old in some cases (I’ve been upgrading my personal machine to used or refurbished ThinkPad’s every few years). Linux is lightweight enough that it will run on almost anything.
This has the added benefit of being something you can repurpose as hardware for your homelab. Any laptop or pc can easily find a second or third life as a headless server or hypervisor for running Virtual Machines. Repurposing old hardware has the added benefit of reducing e-waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
A.1 Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
As a last resort, I recommend installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which will provide access to a Linux OS + CLI which for many things is all you need. I’ve used this as a Linux-based local development environment when I was forced to run Windows for some work machines. Since installing WSL requires admin privileges, this is probably a help desk ticket if you don’t have admin on your system.
Installing the Vagrant CLI on a WSL system should be the same as on a baremetal Linux system. But using it to manage VirtualBox requires some additional configuration that’s unfortunately outside of the scope of this guide and can pose it’s own challenges. Smhk’s guide on How to set up Ansible and Vagrant in WSL may help overcome some of the pitfalls you’re likely to encounter with this type of setup.