The potential benefits of 2 or 3 is that you could use dedicated hypervisor o/s. I have one proxmox server, a server which was ClearVM but we did things to break ClearVM and now just run it as Centos with KVM command line, and I have ClearOS running KVM/Kimchi.

I don't see a benefit to running clearos in a vm if I can run a hyper visor in the base clearos install. I picture the methods:

ClearOS with xen or kvm
>>windows server
>>ADDC
>>Fog

some Linux distro with xen or kvm
>>clearos with nic passthrough
>>windows server
>>ADDC
>>Fog

xenserver hypervisor
>>clearos with nic passthrough
>>windows server
>>ADDC
>>Fog

What would be the potential benefit of the second/third methods?

Thanks Nick. The section on installing the graphical desktop / manager was a bit daunting. "Don't do this, you will die, only for platinum users with a team of engineers."

I think hypervisors often have the ability to pass through NIC's and ports. From Googling, Xen does - https://www.google.com/search?q=xen+passthrough+wifi+nic.

From your link, there are a couple of glitches installing KVM in ClearOS but I run it. I also sometimes use Kimchi, but it is relatively old and there is an annoying bug (if you upload an iso, it ends up with the wrong permissions so you have to change them before you can use them). You can also use the graphical desktop and Virtual Machine Manager to manage KVM. There is a howto in our knowledgebase. The command line isn't too bad either. In ClearOS you can also run VirtualBox.

I guess this is what I'm going with.

https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/best-virtualization-approach