Came in here to mention Incus if no one had.
I love it. I have three “home production” servers running Proxmox, but mostly because Proxmox is one of very few LTS/comercially-supported ways to run Linux in a supported way with root (and everything else on ZFS). And while its web UI is still a bit clunky in places, it comes in handy some times.
However, Incus automation is just… superior. incus launch --vm images:debian/13 foo, wait a few seconds then incus exec foo – bash and I’m root on a console of a ready-to-go Debian VM. Without –vm, it’s a lightweight LXC container. And Ansible supports running commands through incus exec, so you can provision stuff WITHOUT BOTHERING TO SET UP ANYTHING.
AND, it works remotely without fuss, so I can set up an Incus remote on a beefy server and spawn VMs nearly transparently. + incus file pull|push to transfer files.
I’m kinda pondering scripting removal of the Proxmox bits from a Proxmox install, so that I just keep their ZFS support and run Incus on top.
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
I’m looking at Opnsense on an Incus VM soon, what was your fight there? Good to know what I’ll hit ;)
Agreed on that path - some networking (like mimicking proxmox’s bridge connections which give VMs their own MAC/IP) takes effort to find the solution. But the basic LXC/VM-shares-your-IP works super easily and the script ability is great. Plus it doesn’t feel like a yoke on your system that is heavy and drives it, but just another application! I feel it’s close enough, and when you get it where you want it, it’s perf. I assume they’ll get “one click” solutions for the harder stuff baked in as they get more attention and traction.
tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
“Just” some highly specific VM settings, in the end. I don’t know much about that, and terms like qemu don’t mean anything to me so I followed blog posts until it worked. It’s possible that it is actually trivial.
It’s been a while, but I can look up what I have when you need it. Feel free to ping me!
Yes, it was exactly that: Once I got the NICs set up the way I wanted them it was a breeze and everything just works. And I really like that I made every part work myself, no magic. I learned a lot, and wouldn’t have had I relied on Proxmox fiddling with the right parts for me.
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Thanks for the links! I had no idea there were special settings needed