In the next ~6 months I’m going to entirely overhaul my setup. Today I have a NUC6i3 running Home Assistant OS, and a NUC8i7 running OpenMediaVault with all the usual suspects via Docker.
I want to upgrade hardware significantly, partially because I’d like to bring in some local LLM. Nothing crazy, 1-8B models hitting 50tps would make me happy. But even that is going to mean a beefy machine compared to today, which will be nice for everything else too of course.
I’m still all over the place on hardware, part of what I’m trying to decide is whether to go with a single machine for everything or keep them separate.
Idea 1 is a beefy machine and Proxmox with HA in a VM, OMV or TrueNAS in another, and maybe a 3rd straight Debian to separate all the Docker stuff. But I don’t know if I want to add the complexity.
Idea 2 would be beefy machine for straight OMV/TrueNAS and run most stuff there, and then just move HA over to the existing i7 for more breathing room (mostly for Frigate, which could also separate to other machine I guess).
I hear a lot of great things about Proxmox, but I’m not sold that it’s worth the new complexity for me. And keeping HA (which is “critical” compared to everything else) separated feels like a smart choice. But keeping it on aging hardware diminishes that anyway, so I don’t know.
Just wanting to hear various opinions I guess.
You must log in or register to comment.
In my opinion, Proxmox is worth it for two reasons:
-
Easy high-availability setup and control
-
Proxmox Backup Server
Those two are what drove me to switch from KVM, and I don’t regret it at all. PBS truly is a fantastic piece of software.
Upvoted for PBS alone. Incremental backups that are rock solid mean you can completely brick your server and have it back to normal in minutes
-
I did it purely so I could fully back up my server VM and move it to new hardware when I wanted to upgrade. I just have to install Proxmox, attach the NAS, and pull the VM backup. And just like that everything is back to running just as it was before the upgrade! Now just faster and more energy efficient!
I have recently moved non-vm truenas to a new hardware and actually it was a breeze. I just created the backup, disconnected the drives, physically put them into the new server, install the truenas, restored the backup, and it was done. I understand that everyone has different preferences. I’m just saying that it’s easy to move truenas without it being the VM as well.
The one factor that no one seems to have mentioned yet that is key for many of us is LEARNING …
It’s a great way to learn virtualization and containerization
I use it exclusively to run Linux containers, it makes it very convenient to backup and restore as well as replicate environments.
We are now migrating our lab at work away from VMW
Do you need clusters that can failure ver from one machine to another? Is yes, proxmox is good. If no, there are less complex options.
Why rule out proxmox as “complex” just because there is no need for HA??
Because it moves further from a vanilla setup without solving a problem.
From an earlier post I made much like yours, I decided to go with incus. I’d be fully migrated if real life hadn’t kicked me in the taint for a few weeks.
It’s great if you need what it offers. Otherwise, it’s simpler to set up something like Ubuntu Server.
I use Proxmox to run my email service, https://port87.com/, because I can have high-availability services that can move around the different Proxmox hosts. It’s great for production stuff.
I also use it to run my seedbox, because graphics in the browser through Proxmox is really easy.
For everything else (my Jellyfin, Nextcloud, etc), I have a server that runs Ubuntu Server and use a docker compose stack for each service.
I had never heard of Port87 before, how do you like it? And I assume you pay no monthly fee by hosting your own domain?
I meant that I made it. :) It’s my own email service, and I run it on Proxmox. So, take this with a grain of salt knowing that I wrote and run it, but I think it’s the best email service by far. I wrote an article about how it works really well for me here:
https://sciactive.com/2023/07/17/the-best-email-for-those-who-struggle-with-organization/
Feel free to sign up for free and try it out. :D
Interesting.
I have an old free email provider that’s just passed the email service to another provider
I’m looking to move because I used to be able to use <anything-at-all>@my-email.domain and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that anymore
I basically do what you’re doing - using email prefixes for the site I’m registering with… I even caught a company out once when I suddenly started getting spam from that email address. They’d sold my details…
You should check out Port87. :) You wouldn’t need to change any of your addresses if you bring your domain on. Custom domains is $10/month though, so it would cost you more. Hopefully the features would be worth it for you, and if not, you can always migrate it again to a different provider. That’s something I love about email. If you have your own domain, you can completely avoid vendor lock in.
I’m running Proxmox and hate it. I still recommend it for what you are trying to do. I think it would work quite nicely. Three of my four nodes have llama.cpp VMs hosting OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoints (llama-server) and I run Claude Code against that using a simple translation proxy.
Proxmox is very opinionated on certain aspects and I much prefer bare metal k8s for my needs.
Don’t use Proxmox, use incus. It’s way easier to run and doesn’t give a care about your storage.
I like Incus a lot, but it’s not as easy to create complex virtual networksnas it is with proxmox, which is frustrating in educational/learning environments.
I like ProxMox too, I’m quite happy that I dove in with it. Just one word of warning - if you mount a drive volume in a container, destroy the container and restore it from a backup, it wipes out the mounted drive. I, uh, lost a bunch of data that way. Not super important data, but still.
I’m still glad I went with ProxMox though. It makes spinning up something a breeze, and I also went with HA in a VM, and another Debian VM for Docker, and a bunch of random LXCs.
Is this separate from a bind mount? Cause that doesn’t happen with bind mounts.
Yeah, not a bind mount. There was a warning, but I was restoring a ton of LXCs and clicked through the warning too fast. My fault, I’m not super sore about it, just warning others as a service to prevent what happened to me!
Fair enough!
If you can replicate it, you should really file a bug report so that the next guy doesn’t lose data.
It tells you it will happen when you use the restore backup feature.
I shy away from VMs because I prefer having a pool of resources on a machine that can be used as needed instead of being pre-allocated. Pre-allocating CPU, RAM, and doing PCI passthough for GPUs wastes already limited resources and is extra effort. Yes, the best practice for production k8s is setting resource requests and limits, but it’s not something I want to bother with when I only have one server.
Just to address the resourcing point…
VM resources can be over allocated, meaning that the hypervisor will try it’s best to meet their requirements, so you’re not wasting anything and could run more VMs than you have resources for.
Yes, VMs can also be configured to need a certain amount of resources and the hypervisor will have to stop, but I just wanted you to know it’s not fixed.
Proxmox is a convenient gui wrapper around libvirt but you can do everything without it.
but you can do everything without it.
yes but why would you? There’s a reason we use GUIs, especially when new to a field (like virtualization).
libvirt comes with some gui tool of its own, though I haven’t used it. I generally prefer to understand what I’m doing, so I use command line tools or API’s at first. GUI’s are a convenience to use later, once it’s clear how they work.
Once you get to know the GUI well enough and start scripting, the GUI becomes less relevant.
It’s got more than just VM management, but yeah, it’s a frontend for a bunch of other services, that you don’t need Proxmox for.
This is untrue, proxmox is not a wrapper around libvirt. It has it’s own API and it’s own methods of running VM’s.
For me, I’m Team Proxmox. It’s just easy to spin up containers for pretty much anything I need. No need for the resource overhead of a full-on virtual machine if I simply need to run a LAMP app. Anything you really have an issue transitioning from Docker to LXC can still be run inside a container with Docker installed. And if you need to set up a VM for Windows or pfSense or some other OS for whatever reason, it’s insanely easy to do.
I use Proxmox for Work and Hyper-V at home. Looking forward to retiring my old Hyper-V host and replace it with Proxmox because Hyper-V is a pain.
Virtualization really helps with reliability. In particular, by allowing you to quickly take snapshots before doing anything destructive and by streamlining backup and recovery.
I’ve been using Ganeti for like 15 years now, and I’m not sure what proxmox offers besides a nice GUI. I know how Ganeti works and getting up to speed on a new one doesn’t seem super interesting to me. Is anyone here familiar with both?
Best thing to do is give it a go and see what shakes out OP. I absolutely love both my Proxmox boxes. In my humble opinion, Proxmox was an easier set up, and the possibilities are endless really. It’s a solid freemium product. Couple it with the extensive Helper Scripts, and Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle.
