4 ms·

Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro)

Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff.

regecks 7y ago
I run it on a single node to run LXC guests for all sorts of non-production workloads. That it takes care of all the networking, storage, OS templates, backups, KVM access and has a comprehensive web UI is all very useful to me. What else is there to take its place? oVirt can't do LXC.
- anon9001 7y ago
  virt-manager can do lxc. I rdesktop to the server and set up things with virt-manager. You can also install pve on a debian system if you want the proxmox gui. If you want to do full disk encryption, that's the recommended approach, because proxmox's installer doesn't support it.
BuildTheRobots 7y ago
I'd disagree entirely. If you want an extremely easy to use gui that gives you access to KVM and LXC virtualisations, along with easy access web remote consoles, snapshots and backups, then Proxmox has been a fantastic go-to for over 6 years. My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior.
- dngray 7y ago
  > Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff. > My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior. Why not Alpine Linux? I use that in diskless mode https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    > If you want an extremely easy to use gui that gives you access to KVM and LXC virtualisations, along with easy access web remote consoles, snapshots and backups My understanding is that alpine is a very light weight linux ditro and isn't a productised, easy to use hypervisor with full control via a gui. It's a bit like me saying "I like music editing using xxx because it has a tonne of value added, makes it easy, but it requires an amount of hardware resource" and someone replying "pah, I just use a reel-to-reel, some sharp scissors and a roll of tape!" - unless I'm missing something, it's not really comparable. edit: as tfigment pointed out along side my comment, I'm slightly annoyed that proxmox is a full-fat linux install for the hypervisor. The comparison I tried to make was with vmware ESXi which boots from an SD card or USB stick and is almost entirely held in memory after boot. ESXi has a whole number of other issues attached to it, but the fact I can throw a £10 usb stick in a server and use that as a boot drive, rather than "wasting" two of my SATA/SAS bays to a pair of real disks with the hypervisor installed on is nice.
  - tfigment 7y ago
    They mean proxmox requires full debian. Pretty sure its not a choice. In VMs you can run anything qemu runs. Also no Docker. The devs are opinionated, not that that is necessarily an issue.
    - roboyoshi 7y ago
      Docker has been on the wishlist for a while but it seems like the developers refuse to integrate it. I just installed docker-ce manually and added portainer as a systemd service. That way I can manage containers with a 2nd webui.
      - regecks 7y ago
        Oh, neat. I've been wanting to do something like that, but I was afraid that the combination of LXC + Docker would blow up due to networking or cgroups or something. Are you running Docker and LXC containers side by side? Any documentation on how you did it?
      - 7y ago
- tfigment 7y ago
  Mostly agree but proxmox still has quite a few quirks. Its cloud-init support is difficult to use unless you just need hostname and single user and single NIC which does cover a lot of cases but not mine. Its web api is non-standard and cannot upload full cloud-init config files but requires files already on disk. Also no Docker, just LxC. I found ESXi free tier better for test lab for somethings like backup and snapshots but no creating vms from scratch via api was an issue which is why I used Proxmox in first place.
F00Fbug 7y ago
But you don't get that great UI. I'm the world's biggest Linux cheerleader; one thing you never hear is that almost every 'modern' Linux has a hypervisor built-in (KVM/QEMU) to it. PVE is basically Debian with a wonderful web-UI wrapped around KVM/QEMU. You don't really need it, but it sure makes life easy!
- reinhardt1053 7y ago
  Unless you need clustering and shared storage. Without Proxmox you are gonna need to setup corosync/ceph yourself.
unixhero 7y ago
I disagree completely. It makes sense to use Proxmox at home or in a business on a lot of planes. Ceph usage is not required, and it comes with excellent ZFS support. There are a lot of other great features which Proxmox facilitates.
Proven 7y ago
Yes. It's nice for LXC and Linux VMs and use cases that fit its feature set, but not nearly as versatile and integrated as commercial hypervisors. Most enterprise users would eventually have to also have - or leave in place - an (enterprise) virtualization platform. For others, it may or may not work.
gmuslera 7y ago
You can see it as Debian, with a web gui for managing virtualized resources. Ceph is not required, but it is something nice to have if you have many hypervisors and no central storage. But it is meant for using the machine mainly as an hypervisor, not as a desktop with the ability to ocasionally run a few virtual machines (in that case kvm+virt_manager or virtualbox are more desktop friendly).

regecks 7y ago

I run it on a single node to run LXC guests for all sorts of non-production workloads. That it takes care of all the networking, storage, OS templates, backups, KVM access and has a comprehensive web UI is all very useful to me. What else is there to take its place? oVirt can't do LXC.

anon9001 7y ago
virt-manager can do lxc. I rdesktop to the server and set up things with virt-manager. You can also install pve on a debian system if you want the proxmox gui. If you want to do full disk encryption, that's the recommended approach, because proxmox's installer doesn't support it.

BuildTheRobots 7y ago

I'd disagree entirely. If you want an extremely easy to use gui that gives you access to KVM and LXC virtualisations, along with easy access web remote consoles, snapshots and backups, then Proxmox has been a fantastic go-to for over 6 years. My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior.

dngray 7y ago
> Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff. > My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior. Why not Alpine Linux? I use that in diskless mode https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode
- BuildTheRobots 7y ago
  > If you want an extremely easy to use gui that gives you access to KVM and LXC virtualisations, along with easy access web remote consoles, snapshots and backups My understanding is that alpine is a very light weight linux ditro and isn't a productised, easy to use hypervisor with full control via a gui. It's a bit like me saying "I like music editing using xxx because it has a tonne of value added, makes it easy, but it requires an amount of hardware resource" and someone replying "pah, I just use a reel-to-reel, some sharp scissors and a roll of tape!" - unless I'm missing something, it's not really comparable. edit: as tfigment pointed out along side my comment, I'm slightly annoyed that proxmox is a full-fat linux install for the hypervisor. The comparison I tried to make was with vmware ESXi which boots from an SD card or USB stick and is almost entirely held in memory after boot. ESXi has a whole number of other issues attached to it, but the fact I can throw a £10 usb stick in a server and use that as a boot drive, rather than "wasting" two of my SATA/SAS bays to a pair of real disks with the hypervisor installed on is nice.
- tfigment 7y ago
  They mean proxmox requires full debian. Pretty sure its not a choice. In VMs you can run anything qemu runs. Also no Docker. The devs are opinionated, not that that is necessarily an issue.
  - roboyoshi 7y ago
    Docker has been on the wishlist for a while but it seems like the developers refuse to integrate it. I just installed docker-ce manually and added portainer as a systemd service. That way I can manage containers with a 2nd webui.
    - regecks 7y ago
      Oh, neat. I've been wanting to do something like that, but I was afraid that the combination of LXC + Docker would blow up due to networking or cgroups or something. Are you running Docker and LXC containers side by side? Any documentation on how you did it?
    - 7y ago
tfigment 7y ago
Mostly agree but proxmox still has quite a few quirks. Its cloud-init support is difficult to use unless you just need hostname and single user and single NIC which does cover a lot of cases but not mine. Its web api is non-standard and cannot upload full cloud-init config files but requires files already on disk. Also no Docker, just LxC. I found ESXi free tier better for test lab for somethings like backup and snapshots but no creating vms from scratch via api was an issue which is why I used Proxmox in first place.

F00Fbug 7y ago

But you don't get that great UI. I'm the world's biggest Linux cheerleader; one thing you never hear is that almost every 'modern' Linux has a hypervisor built-in (KVM/QEMU) to it. PVE is basically Debian with a wonderful web-UI wrapped around KVM/QEMU. You don't really need it, but it sure makes life easy!

reinhardt1053 7y ago
Unless you need clustering and shared storage. Without Proxmox you are gonna need to setup corosync/ceph yourself.

unixhero 7y ago

I disagree completely. It makes sense to use Proxmox at home or in a business on a lot of planes. Ceph usage is not required, and it comes with excellent ZFS support. There are a lot of other great features which Proxmox facilitates.

Proven 7y ago

Yes. It's nice for LXC and Linux VMs and use cases that fit its feature set, but not nearly as versatile and integrated as commercial hypervisors. Most enterprise users would eventually have to also have - or leave in place - an (enterprise) virtualization platform. For others, it may or may not work.

gmuslera 7y ago

You can see it as Debian, with a web gui for managing virtualized resources. Ceph is not required, but it is something nice to have if you have many hypervisors and no central storage. But it is meant for using the machine mainly as an hypervisor, not as a desktop with the ability to ocasionally run a few virtual machines (in that case kvm+virt_manager or virtualbox are more desktop friendly).