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A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-manag
by NelsonMinar 3y ago
A bit of a tangent but I want to sing the praises of Proxmox for home servers. I've run some sort of Linux server in my home for 25 years now, always hand-managing a single Ubuntu (or whatever) system. It's a huge pain.
Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device. I started by just virtualizing the one big Ubuntu system. Even that has advantages: backups, high availability, etc. But now I'm starting to split off services into their own containers and it's just so tidy!
- 2024throwaway 3y agoHow exactly does running a VM in proxmox give you high availability?
- karolist 3y agoIt doesn't on its own but it simplifies things hard to roll by hand that does, like observation nodes, consensus algorithms, Ceph storage, live migrations etc.
- astockwell 3y agoSome defense against the class(es) of availability problems that occur from OS + upwards. No defense against the class(es) that occur below that (metal).
- wutwutwat 3y agoProxmox comes with baked in support for live vm migration[0], high availability[1] and clustering support[2] if you run multiple host nodes. I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to 0: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_migration https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_mig... & https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_guest_migration https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_guest... 1: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_how_it_works_2 https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_how_i... 2: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_pvecm https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapte...
- unpopularopp 3y ago>Proxmox makes it very easy to have multiple containers and VMs on a single hardware device I just wish there was something like Unraid's Docker support but in a FOSS distro. Proxmox with LXC is just not the same. Unraid is good, love the UI and easyness too but the proprietary paid Linux is just something I don't like.
- xxpor 3y agoFWIW https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ has a docker LXC container. A bit meta but works fine for my use cases. But I agree with your general point.
- haltcatchfire 3y agoEspecially now with the rumors of Unraid moving from pay-once to an annual subscription model.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoI believe this was confirmed and they aim to switch by end of the month. Those interested in Unraid who prefer the old model may wish to pick up a perpetual license now. https://unraid.net/blog/pricing-change https://unraid.net/blog/pricing-change disclaimer - I'm not an Unraid user.
- Ecsta 3y agoThey're still continuing to have a lifetime license option, it's just going up in price.
- whalesalad 3y agoProxmox is ultimately just debian linux. You can install portainer on the host. Or create a VM running portainer.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoMost folks who need Docker in Proxmox just set up a VM for it. It's a bit goofy but works fine. Portainer is a popular UI frontend for Docker. I like LXC alright but I do miss the ecosystem of DockerHub.
- cmehdy 3y agoProxmox is incredibly helpful especially for homelab beginners familiar with Linux. You can easily create and destroy various things as you learn. Only thing that's not so easy to use is storage in general : it's very difficult to truly understand the consequences of various choices and therefore it's kinda difficult to properly set up the backbone of a NAS unless you're fairly comfortable with zfs, lvm, lvm-thin, re-partitioning things, etc..
- radiowave 3y agoAnother handy feature of it is snapshots, very useful before trying out some modification.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoOne thing Proxmox is missing (IMHO) is a simple storage sharing system. I ended up just running the kernel NFS server on my Proxmox hypervisor, then sharing disks via a virtual-only LAN to the guest images. Other folks run an NFS server or a full NAS system in a VM under Proxmox. Proxmox' official solution for this is Ceph but that seems like overkill for a small home setup.
- Spivak 3y agoHyperconverged Ceph is both trivial to set up and amazing. Would highly highly recommend it, it makes everything so much easier when your VMs are backed by RBDs.
- dusanh 3y agoAny good tutorials for dummies like me?
- Spivak 3y agoI've followed the official one with good success. They do assume some familiarity with ceph but it's not too much. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Clu...
- aaronax 3y agoAnd a huge win that it makes it so easy to have distributed storage. Ceph is built-in and works well. Being able to add disks as needed is bliss (no RAID planning up front). And the rebuild situation is better than any RAID. Performance is adequate for homelab even on a 1gbps network. I have about 10 SSDs mixed 1TB and 2TB across 5 hosts (old Optiplex units).
- didntcheck 3y agoThat sounds interesting, I'm only tangentially familiar with Ceph so forgive these stupid questions: So you have the Ceph "array" running on the Proxmox nodes, and then are your VHDs like objects on Ceph? Do you also use Ceph for direct data storage or are all your files and data within VM's VHDs?
- k8sToGo 3y agoCombining that with Proxmox Backup Server is awesome.
- globular-toast 3y agoObviously you could have just run containers on that Ubuntu system. And nothing stopping you backing it up either. But you might as well start with a hypervisor on a new server, though. It gives you more flexibility to add other distros and non-Linux stuff into the mix too (I run an OPNsense router, for example). I use xcp-ng rather than Proxmox.
- caconym_ 3y ago+1, Proxmox is awesome. I set up a cluster with two machines I wasn't using (one almost 10 years old, one fairly modern with a 5950X) and now I don't have to worry about that single Debian box with all my services on it shitting the bed and leaving me with nothing. VMs are useful on their own, but the tools Proxmox gives you for migrating them between machines and doing centralized backup/restore are incredibly freeing. It all works really well, too. Most recently I set up a Windows VM with PCIe GPU passthrough for streaming (Moonlight/Sunshine) games to the various less-capable machines in my house, and it works so well that my actual gaming PC is sitting in the corner gathering dust. My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid license. I would love to give back to them for what I'm getting, but > $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts to hobbyist usage. I appreciate the free tier (which is not at all obnoxious about the fact that you aren't paying), but I wish there could be a middle ground.
- znpy 3y ago> My only complaint is I wish there was a cheaper paid license. I would love to give back to them for what I'm getting, but > $100/yr/cpu is just too much for what amounts to hobbyist usage. I don't use proxmox anymore at home (1) but as an user I would have loved to pay, say, $5/month and just get access to the updates repository (the stable ones) or maybe something similar. $100/year/cpu was just too much for me as an hobbyist. [1]: not because I don't like it, for life reasons I had to downsize that hobby a bit and I don't need proxmox anymore.
- didntcheck 3y agoAs someone still in monolithic home server tech debt I've been meaning to migrate too. The part I always wonder about is storage - said server is a NAS, serving files over SMB and media over Plex. From what I hear some people mount and export their data array [1] directly on Proxmox and only virtualize things above the storage layer, like Plex, while others PCI-passthrough an HBA [2] to a NAS VM. I suppose one advantage of doing the former is that you might be able to directly bind mount it into an LXC container rather than using loopback SMB/NFS/9p, right? I also hear some people just go with TrueNAS or Unraid as their bare-metal base and use it for both storage and as a hypervisor, which makes sense. I might have to try the Linux version of TrueNAS now that it's had some time to mature I also rely on my Intel processor's built-in Quicksync for HW transcoding. Is there any trouble getting that to run through a VM, except presumably sacrificing the local Proxmox TTY? [1] As in the one with the files on, not VHDs. I default to keeping those separate in the first place, but it's also necessary since I can't afford to put all data on SSDs nor tolerate OS roots on HDDs. Otherwise a single master ZFS array with datasets for files and zvols or just NFS for VM roots would probably be ideal [2] Which I hear is considered more reliable than individual SATA passthrough, but has the caveat of being more coarse-grained. I.e. you wouldn't be able to have any non-array disks attached to it due to the VM having exclusive control of all its ports
- haunter 3y ago>I also hear some people just go with TrueNAS or Unraid as their bare-metal base and use it for both storage and as a hypervisor, which makes sense. I might have to try the Linux version of TrueNAS now that it's had some time to mature Unraid is especially meant for that. But TrueNAS Scale is also good, it has Docker and Kubernetes support too. There is also openmediavault, it's a bit more Linux-y than the Unraid or TrueNAS Scale but a lot of people love it
- kungp 3y ago> I suppose one advantage of doing the former is that you might be able to directly bind mount it into an LXC container rather than using loopback SMB/NFS/9p, right? Yep, I do this and it's very simple to give LXCs access to parts of my storage array.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoWhat's the main value vs using something like K3? I've mostly just been defaulting to k3 since I use k8s at work so lots of my knowledge maps over.