If I wanted to use a virtual machine with a VPN, do I run the VPN through my main pc or on the virtual machine itself? Or does it not really matter?
I want to know too lol
Doesn’t matter. However one thing you want to get right, is whether or not your internet connection for your VM is bridged.
When your VM network adapter is set to bridged mode, the VM will own part of your physical network adapter, bypassing your host machine (“main pc”). You can check if this is the case by checking to see if from your router you can see two local IPs assigned to your machine.
If your VPN client is running on your host machine, and your VM is set to be bridged, the activity on the VM will not go through the VPN, as it is stepping around the host machine.
My advice is to either run the VPN client on your host machine and set up the VM network adapter to be NAT and not bridged, or run the VPN client on your VM and set the VM to be bridged.
If you want a fully isolated Virtual Machine on a VPN, set the VM up in Bridged Mode, so it has it’s own IP address on the LAN, and install the VPN on the VM itself
If you want the PC and VM to share the same VPN, set the networking up in NAT mode and have the VPN running on the PC
You could even add to this, and have the VM on NAT networking, and then have the VPN active on the main machine, then also the VPN on the VM. This would create a 2 hop proxy chain for the VM. The VPN on the VM would connect to the VPN through the VPN on the main machine.