Planning on setting up Proxmox and moving most services there. Some questions

TCB13 , 5 months ago

It's 2024, avoid Proxmox and safe yourself a LOT of headaches down the line.

You most likely don’t need Proxmox and its pseudo-open-source bullshit. My suggestion is to simply with with Debian 12 + LXD/LXC, it runs VMs and containers very well. Proxmox ships with an old kernel that is so mangled and twisted that they shouldn’t even be calling it a Linux kernel. Also their management daemons and other internal shenanigans will delay your boot and crash your systems under certain circumstances.

What I would suggest you to use use instead is LXD/Incus.

LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly - essentially what Proxmox does but properly done. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

I draw your attention to containers (not docker), LXC containers because for most people full virtualization isn't even required. In a small homelab if you can have containers that behave like full operating systems (minus the kernel) including persistence, VMs might not be required. Either way LXD/Incus will allow for both and you can easily mix and match and use what you require for each use case.

For eg. I virtualize the official HomeAssistant image with LXD because we all know how hard is to get that thing running, however my NAS / Samba shares are just a LXD Debian 12 container with Samba4, Nginx and FileBrowser. Sames goes for torrent client that has its own container. Some other service I've exposed to the internet also runs a full VM for isolation.

Like Proxmox, LXD/Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. I can guarantee you that most people running Proxmox today it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no BS licenses and way less overhead.

Yes, there's a WebUI for LXD as well!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9caa6ea8-17b1-48f6-a8c2-ff3f606f3482.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a5a110b2-ed6f-431f-a767-0a21fb337a6b.png

node815 , 5 months ago

Since you didn't include a link to the source for your recommendation:

https://github.com/canonical/lxd

I've been on Proxmox for 6 or so months with very few issues and have found it to work well in my instance, I do appreciate seeing another alternative and learning about it too! I very specifically like Proxmox as it gives me an actual IP on my router's subnet for my machines such as Home Assistant. So instead of the 192.168.122.1 it rolls a nice 192.168.1.X/24 IP which fits my range which makes it easier for me to direct my outside traffic to it. Does this also do this? Based on your screenshots, maybe not, IDK.

possiblylinux127 , 5 months ago

Your comment is wrong in a few ways and suggests using a LXC which is way slower than docker or podman and lacks the easy setup.

Proxmox is good because it makes it easy to create VMs and setup least access. It also has as new of kernel as stable Debian so no, its not terribly out of date.

If you want to suggest that someone install Debian + Docker compose that would make more sense. This isn't a good setup for more advanced setups and it doesn't allow for a not of flexibility.

TCB13 , 5 months ago

This was a discussion about management solutions such as Proxmox and LXD and NOT about containerization technologies like Docker or LXC. Also Proxmox uses the Proxmox VE Kernel that is derived from Ubuntu.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. I'm not even sure you know the difference between LXD and LXC...

MangoPenguin , 5 months ago

How well does it handle backups, and are they deduplicated incremental ones like proxmox backup server makes?

TCB13 , 5 months ago

I do regular snapshots of my containers live and sometimes restore them, no issues there. De-duplication and incremental features are (mostly) provided by the storage backend, if you use BTRFS or ZFS for your storage pool every container will be a volume that you can snapshot, rollback, export at any time. LXD also provides tools to make those operations: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/lxd/en/latest/howto/instances_backup/

MangoPenguin , 5 months ago

That makes sense, but no remote backups over the network? Local snapshots I don't really count as backups.

lazynooblet , 5 months ago

Can someone explain the benefits of LXD without the opinionated crap?

TCB13 , 5 months ago

create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

What else do you need.

• https://github.com/canonical/lxd
• https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/LXD-Linux-container-hypervisor