Comment on Selfhosted virtualisation learning kit
RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 1 year ago
I run a lot of these services in my homelab. I didn’t really feel like I had something with real potential until I started using Proxmox as my hypervisor. That’s when things exploded. You can create VMs and containers on it with ease, and all the features I would normally have to rely on command line for were also available on the Proxmox web interface. That is so convenient! Need to do a snapshot because you think you might screw up your install on step 37? No problem, just take care of it in the GUI.
Proxmox also handles clustering really well, which will probably benefit you. You can add a Raspberry Pi or two, or a PC, and Proxmox will just manage them all. It will even move services from one device to another if one device gets turned off. It’s really incredible!
The one thing I wouldn’t build yourself is a NAS. I went with a Synology, and I’m glad I did. Building (and maintaining) one from scratch is just more work than I really have time for. With a NAS, you want things to go perfectly all the time, including updates and security updates, so I’m happy to leave most of the testing and configuration to Synology’s team. I just have to remember to update things periodically, which I’m willing to do.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 year ago
I’m intrigued by what you said about proxmox. I’ve always run KVM and had multiple copies of my servers running behind a load balancer, but “clustering” sounds interesting. To me that word sounds like something that would allow high-availability to multiple VMs, possibly all running the same image so I don’t have to worry about tracking internal IP addresses and such… but I’m sure it’s not quite that simple. So could you give me a quick summary on what clustering really means in this case?
RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 1 year ago
I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.
You should be able to watch them and get the overview you’re looking for. But really, this whole course is excellent from start to finish. I watched it before I ever touched Proxmox, and I’m glad I did. It was instrumental in helping me choose Proxmox as my hypervisor and gave me a great idea of what hardware I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 year ago
OK cool, so I watched #15 and did a little reading on clustering under kvm, and it seems to be fairly similar to the way I’m doing things now. There are some differences in how the cluster is accessed, but basically it’s a set of VMs using shared storage and all machines run the same image for their functionality. I seem to recall some things like proxmox provide a tool to upgrade all machines identically… There’s probably other tools to do that but I don’t have a lot of machines so the only real issue has been in remembering to do full version updates.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If you’re trying to keep version updates on sync across lots of machines you might want to look into Ansible.