Selfhosted virtualisation learning kit

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PanPuszek@reddthat.com⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hello Lads and Ladettes,

I’m reaching out to ask for your help and to know your opinion. Currently I have a simple setup of RPi 3 that only serves as a DNS (pihole). I’ve read some of your posts and I got hooked. I also started playing with HyperV on my Windows PC and created a virtual linux machine (Arch btw ~for meme purposes~).

I have started thinking… What if I bought RPi 4B (8GB RAM) and use some kind of a hypervisor to selfhost DNS and DHCP (pihole), VPN, SSO and maybe even NAS (some kind of platform like plex?).

It’s all for learning purposes, so I’m not aiming for anything extra expensive, reliable or ultra-fast. I know the basics, though I’m still a beginner. I thought the RPi 4B would be a good choice as it’s relatively cheap and not energy-hungry.

My questions are: What do you think about it in general? Do you know any alternatives to VMware ESXi that I can use for virtualisation? Any tips and trick you have to share? Do you think that RPi 4B can handle such task?

Maybe you know some good, free, open source VPN and SSO services that you can recommed. For NAS I was thinking about OpenMediaVault but I would also be thankful for recommendations in that regard as well.

Thanks in advance for all the help and healthy discussion. Cheers!

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Comments

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goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
@PanPuszek Is there a reason you’re not considering docker containers for this stuff? I run most of what you mention on Pis in docker containers.
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- Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Agreed. Docker is the tool you’re looking for here OP. It will help you make use of your available resources much more efficiently, and management will be easier too.
  
  If you’re not a fan of the command line, give Portainer a whirl. Finding compose files for all of those services you’re looking at should be trivially easy.
  
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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.

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- 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?
  
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  - RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.
    
    Episode 15: Clustering
    
    Episode 16: High Availability
    
    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.
    
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redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think using container instead of VM should be better for maximizing resource utilization in a raspberry pi. Instead of partitioning your 8gb RAM into 3-4 VMs, you can run a dozen of containers and probably still have some free RAM.

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