8 ms·

Sylve looks like a decent project with a promising future but this article really doesn't explain why they picked it over Proxmox at all. They explain a lot of

by dizhn 7mo ago

Sylve looks like a decent project with a promising future but this article really doesn't explain why they picked it over Proxmox at all. They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it.

Cyph0n 7mo ago
Sometimes unification can be an advantage. I run Proxmox at home, but now that I have been drinking the NixOS koolaid over the past 2 years, all of my homelab problems suddenly look like Nix-shaped nails.
- dizhn 7mo ago
  I have the same thing with proxmox especially after I realized how well it integrates with proxmox backup server. And I haven't even gotten into clustering yet. It really is a very solid product.
  - Cyph0n 7mo ago
    Indeed, Proxmox VE is an amazing product.
- EnigmaCurry 7mo ago
  Same. Here's how I scratch the NixOS itch on Proxmox and/or libvirt[1]. One interface for both targets. [1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template
  - dizhn 7mo ago
    That feature list looks really good. It would actually be really nice to standardize the guest operating systems in such a way. I actually have a few hosts that only run docker. I might be able to test with those.
- craftkiller 7mo ago
  Well it looks like we might soon be able to have the benefits of NixOS while also having bhyve (and presumably Sylve): https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd
  - dizhn 7mo ago
    https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos Looks like Nix will eat the world soon. :)
    - Cyph0n 7mo ago
      Damn this is crazy!
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
> They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it. A huge, totally obvious, advantage is that FreeBSD isn't using systemd. I'm now nearly systemd-free, if not for Proxmox. But my VMs are systemd free. And, by definition, my containers too (where basically the entire point is that there's a PID 1 for the service and that PID 1, in a container is not systemd). So the last piece missing for me is getting rid of Proxmox because Proxmox is using systemd. I was thinking about going straight to FreeBSD+bhyve (the hypervisor) but that felt a bit raw. FreeBSD+Sylve (using bhyve under the hood) seems to be, at long last, my way out of systemd. I've got several servers at home with Proxmox but I never, on purpose, relied too much on Proxmox: I kept it to the bare minimum. I create VMs and use cloudinit and tried to have most of it automated and always made it with the idea of getting rid of Promox. I've got nothing against Proxmox but fuck systemd. Just fuck that system.
- redserk 7mo ago
  Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a whirl.
  - hedora 7mo ago
    It's not silly at all. I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill". In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to various systemd related issues. (For large values of N.) I assume that means anything built on top of it is flaky + not stable enough for production use.
    - redserk 7mo ago
arch1e 7mo ago
OP here. One thing we mentioned in the blog but probably didn’t emphasize enough is how deeply ZFS is integrated into the UI. With Sylve, you rarely need to touch the CLI. Snapshots, datasets, ZVOLs, even flashing images directly to ZVOLs, it’s all handled from the UI in a straightforward way. That tight ZFS integration also lets us build more flexible backup workflows. You can back up VMs, jails, or entire datasets to any remote machine that supports SSH + ZFS. This is powered by Zelta (https://zelta.space https://zelta.space) (which is embedded directly into the Go backend), so it’s built-in rather than something you bolt on. In Proxmox, you can achieve similar things, but it’s less intuitive and usually involves setting up additional components like Proxmox Backup Server.
- xoa 7mo ago
  Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you've got to do ZVOL instances and thus manual effort or scripting, or you give Proxmox a single big blob then let it manage that with LVM but that means the storage side can't give any granular help on snapshots and the like. It still can deal with data integrity and backups and storage redundancy and all that but no further, and some increased overhead. But on the other hand, I do feel like a really firm separation of concerns isn't without value. Having native support though is an interesting alternative I hadn't really considered.
  - xoa 7mo ago
    Too late to edit, but just as a note for anyone else who gets confused by my post: I was not paying careful enough attention and missed/misread the "backups" bit in the parent post, completely my fault. As far as I can tell from reading through the (quite pleasant!) documentation [0], Sylve does not (at least for now) support any sort of network storage for direct use as the VM backing store, though as it is FreeBSD underneath it's presumably doable to get something going from the command line. I'd thought they'd somehow managed to set something up so you could directly use another ZFS system via SSH as the primary backing store with management which would be pretty awesome. It still looks like a beautiful design, but since I'm pretty invested right now in separating out storage into its own hardware vs where compute happens it'd be hard to setup nodes as AIO for the near future at least here. Still an awesome project to learn about and I hope it's successful. ---- 0: https://sylve.io/docs/ https://sylve.io/docs/

by dizhn 7mo ago

Cyph0n 7mo ago

Sometimes unification can be an advantage. I run Proxmox at home, but now that I have been drinking the NixOS koolaid over the past 2 years, all of my homelab problems suddenly look like Nix-shaped nails.

dizhn 7mo ago
I have the same thing with proxmox especially after I realized how well it integrates with proxmox backup server. And I haven't even gotten into clustering yet. It really is a very solid product.
- Cyph0n 7mo ago
  Indeed, Proxmox VE is an amazing product.
EnigmaCurry 7mo ago
Same. Here's how I scratch the NixOS itch on Proxmox and/or libvirt[1]. One interface for both targets. [1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template
- dizhn 7mo ago
  That feature list looks really good. It would actually be really nice to standardize the guest operating systems in such a way. I actually have a few hosts that only run docker. I might be able to test with those.
craftkiller 7mo ago
Well it looks like we might soon be able to have the benefits of NixOS while also having bhyve (and presumably Sylve): https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd
- dizhn 7mo ago
  https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos Looks like Nix will eat the world soon. :)
  - Cyph0n 7mo ago
    Damn this is crazy!

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

> They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it. A huge, totally obvious, advantage is that FreeBSD isn't using systemd. I'm now nearly systemd-free, if not for Proxmox. But my VMs are systemd free. And, by definition, my containers too (where basically the entire point is that there's a PID 1 for the service and that PID 1, in a container is not systemd). So the last piece missing for me is getting rid of Proxmox because Proxmox is using systemd. I was thinking about going straight to FreeBSD+bhyve (the hypervisor) but that felt a bit raw. FreeBSD+Sylve (using bhyve under the hood) seems to be, at long last, my way out of systemd. I've got several servers at home with Proxmox but I never, on purpose, relied too much on Proxmox: I kept it to the bare minimum. I create VMs and use cloudinit and tried to have most of it automated and always made it with the idea of getting rid of Promox. I've got nothing against Proxmox but fuck systemd. Just fuck that system.

redserk 7mo ago
Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a whirl.
- hedora 7mo ago
  It's not silly at all. I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill". In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to various systemd related issues. (For large values of N.) I assume that means anything built on top of it is flaky + not stable enough for production use.
  - redserk 7mo ago

arch1e 7mo ago

OP here. One thing we mentioned in the blog but probably didn’t emphasize enough is how deeply ZFS is integrated into the UI. With Sylve, you rarely need to touch the CLI. Snapshots, datasets, ZVOLs, even flashing images directly to ZVOLs, it’s all handled from the UI in a straightforward way. That tight ZFS integration also lets us build more flexible backup workflows. You can back up VMs, jails, or entire datasets to any remote machine that supports SSH + ZFS. This is powered by Zelta (https://zelta.space https://zelta.space) (which is embedded directly into the Go backend), so it’s built-in rather than something you bolt on. In Proxmox, you can achieve similar things, but it’s less intuitive and usually involves setting up additional components like Proxmox Backup Server.

xoa 7mo ago
Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you've got to do ZVOL instances and thus manual effort or scripting, or you give Proxmox a single big blob then let it manage that with LVM but that means the storage side can't give any granular help on snapshots and the like. It still can deal with data integrity and backups and storage redundancy and all that but no further, and some increased overhead. But on the other hand, I do feel like a really firm separation of concerns isn't without value. Having native support though is an interesting alternative I hadn't really considered.
- xoa 7mo ago
  Too late to edit, but just as a note for anyone else who gets confused by my post: I was not paying careful enough attention and missed/misread the "backups" bit in the parent post, completely my fault. As far as I can tell from reading through the (quite pleasant!) documentation [0], Sylve does not (at least for now) support any sort of network storage for direct use as the VM backing store, though as it is FreeBSD underneath it's presumably doable to get something going from the command line. I'd thought they'd somehow managed to set something up so you could directly use another ZFS system via SSH as the primary backing store with management which would be pretty awesome. It still looks like a beautiful design, but since I'm pretty invested right now in separating out storage into its own hardware vs where compute happens it'd be hard to setup nodes as AIO for the near future at least here. Still an awesome project to learn about and I hope it's successful. ---- 0: https://sylve.io/docs/ https://sylve.io/docs/