Those who are hosting on bare metal: What is stopping you from using Containers or VM's? What are you self hosting?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨kiol@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand who keeps such admins avoiding containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

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erock@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Here’s my homelab journey: bower.sh/homelab

Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet

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OnfireNFS@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
This reminds me of a question I saw a couple years ago. It was basically why would you stick with bare metal over running Proxmox with a single VM.

It kinda stuck with me and since then I’ve reimaged some of my bare metal servers with exactly that. It just makes backup and restore/snapshots so much easier. It’s also really convenient to have a web interface to manage the computer

Probably doesn’t work for everyone but it works for me

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bhamlin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.

I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn’t really suitable for the task.

At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.

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CaptainBasculin@lemmy.bascul.in ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Bare metal is cheaper if you already have some old pc components layjng around and they are not bound to my host pc being on. My PC uses a 600W power supply to run while the old laptop running my Jellyfin + pihole server use like 40W.

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otacon239@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
After many failures, I eventually landed on OMV + Docker. It has a plugin that puts the Docker management into a web UI and for the few simple services I need, it’s very straightforward to maintain. I don’t cloud host because I want complete control of my data and I keep an automatic incremental backup alongside a physically disconnected one that I manually update.

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- kiol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Cool, how are you managing your disks? Are you overall happy with OMV?
  
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  - otacon239@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Very happy with OMV. It’s not crazy customizable, so if you have something specialized, you might run into quirks trying to stick to the Web UI, but it’s just Debian under the hood, so it’s pretty manageable. 4x1TB drives RAID 5 for media/critical data, OS drive, and a Service data drive (databases, etc). Then an external 4TB for the incremental and another external 4TB for the disconnected backup.
    
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StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it’s something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.

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