Comment on Selfhosting Sunday - What's up to date, selfhosters?
Samsy@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I have never understood the hype surrounding proxmox. What makes proxmox so irreplaceable?
In the virtualisation world you have the expensive big boy who everyone now hates ESX by Broadcom (was VMware), the expensive wannabe big boy that everyone hates Hyper-V by Microsoft, and a gazillion others that use Qemu or zen as a base and puts a shiny coat of UI over it.
Proxmox is in that last category. A pretty interface over an open source underlay at a decent price (if you want to pay the subscription).
I’ve tried it a few times, never stuck. I guess it’s just convenience, it is a well integrated piece of software, especially if you use both LXC and VMs. Personally I keep using virt-manager and Cockpit.
I find VMs to BR unbearably sloe compared to a container. They just feel so heavy. I get the extra security layer, is that really why people are doing it or is there some other reason?
Being able to choose the OS and kernel is also important. I would not want my hypervisor machine to load GPU kernel modules, especially not on an older LTS kernel (which often don’t support the latest hardware). Passing the GPU to a VM ensures stability of the host machine, with the flexibility to choose whatever kernel I need for specific hardware. This alongside running entirely different OSes (like *BSD, Windows :(, etc) is pretty useful for some services.
Portability, isolation, the ability to run pretty much anything inside. They do consume more resources, but if they’re that much slower then there’s probably something wrong in your setup.
The easy ui is good for those who aren’t living in the terminal all the time.
I used proxmox for nearly 8 years before switching to only containers. It was fine.
Extra security and full isolation with its own kernel, so you can load kerne modules and such.
Also can run Windows in a VM when needed, or MacOS.
Not everything runs in a container.
Same here, though more out of lack of control over the host. Libvirt works on basically any distro, and you can easily configure whatever Linux distro you like best for running it. I can’t configure my boot process the way I want on Proxmox (at least not without learning/sidestepping its “convenience” tools/setup).
I moved to proxmox earlier this year and it quickly became a huge deal for me.
One nice thing is that I can easily create lxc containers for each service that has exactly what that service needs. Each service lives in a container that acts a lot like bare metal.
A second nice thing is it's really easy to administer everything remotely. All your machines end up accessible through the proxmox interface, and you can hop into virtual machines or lxc containers via the web.
A third thing is you can easily handle hot standby and backups through an easy UI.
Totally changed the game for me.
If you know Linux or are willing to learn, it is very easy to use. If not, it’s going to be a bit of a chore. Some things are just easier to do via CLI.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 1 month ago
Super reliable virtualization and management features. Snapshots, auto backups, live migrations across physical hosts, high availability are what I like the most.