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Advice/poll on switching away from Ubuntu for my VM host. (lemmy.procrastinati.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

First off, I know ultimately I'm the only person who can decide if it's worth it. But I was hoping for some input from your collective experience.

I have a server I built currently running Ubuntu 22.04. I'm using KVM/qemu to host VMs and have recently started exploring the exciting world of Docker, with a VM dedicated to Portainer. I manage the VMs with a mix of virt-manager via xRDP, cli tools, and (if I'm feeling extra lazy) Cockpit. Disks are spindles currently in software Raid 10 (md), and I use LVM to assign volumes to the KVM VMs. Backups are via a script I wrote to snapshot the LVM volume and back it up to B2 via restic.

It all works. Rather smoothly except when it doesn't 😀.

I've been planning an HD upgrade and was considering using that as an excuse to start over. My thoughts are to either install Debian and continue with my status quo, or to give Proxmox a try. I've been reading alot of positive comments about it here and I have longed for one unified web interface to manage my VMs.

My main concerns are:

Backups. I want to be able to backup to B2 but from what I've read I don't see a way to do that. I don't mean backup to a local repository and then sync that to B2. I'm talking direct to B2.
Performance. People rave about ZFS, but I have no experience. Will I get at least equivalent performance out of ZFS and how much RAM will that cost me? Do I even need ZFS or can I just continue to store VMs the way I do today?

Having never used Proxmox to compare I'm really on the fence about this one. I'd appreciate any input. Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

pseudo-open-source bullshit

What do you mean by this?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I'm aware, everything in Proxmox is open source.

I think some people get annoyed by the Red Hat style paid support model, though. There is a separate repo for paying customers, but the non-subscription repo is just fine, and the official forums are a great place to get support, including from Proxmox employees.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Gotcha. So long as they're not breaking GPL or holding back security updates for non-paying users. I could care less. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As said, they've separate repositories, annoying messages asking you for a license all the time etc. At some point you'll find out that their solution doesn't offer anything particular of value that you can't get with other less company dependent solutions like I described before. You may explore the LXD native GUI... or heck even Cockpit or Webmin might be decent options.