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> 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

by 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?
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    What are your thoughts on this setup vs just docker+portainer on regular Ubuntu LTS, or even a dedicated Docker distro like Rancher? I had a previous home server built around docker, and found it fiddly to get right— most of the services I wanted to deploy didn't already have containers, and there was a lot of outer config stuff to play with, getting the containers to restart properly on reboot, getting DNS to resolve them, getting the right data directories set up as binds. But that was also in 2016, so it's likely things are a lot better now, and conversely, it's not necessarily clear that a VM-based approach would be a lot better in some of these areas.
- anon9001 7y ago
  Yeah, proxmox is debian. I think people don't realize you can install their fancy web UI on debian. Proxmox is opinionated about how storage is allocated (I think lvm-thin is a bad idea), doesn't support docker, and has some quirks about getting the apt repos set up correctly if you're not a paying subscriber. It's fine if you want to use things in their opinionated way, but know that they're not doing any magic to make KVM work. KVM and LXC are the exact same as you'd get from debian out of the box.

by dngray 7y ago

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?
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  What are your thoughts on this setup vs just docker+portainer on regular Ubuntu LTS, or even a dedicated Docker distro like Rancher? I had a previous home server built around docker, and found it fiddly to get right— most of the services I wanted to deploy didn't already have containers, and there was a lot of outer config stuff to play with, getting the containers to restart properly on reboot, getting DNS to resolve them, getting the right data directories set up as binds. But that was also in 2016, so it's likely things are a lot better now, and conversely, it's not necessarily clear that a VM-based approach would be a lot better in some of these areas.
anon9001 7y ago
Yeah, proxmox is debian. I think people don't realize you can install their fancy web UI on debian. Proxmox is opinionated about how storage is allocated (I think lvm-thin is a bad idea), doesn't support docker, and has some quirks about getting the apt repos set up correctly if you're not a paying subscriber. It's fine if you want to use things in their opinionated way, but know that they're not doing any magic to make KVM work. KVM and LXC are the exact same as you'd get from debian out of the box.