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.
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In my opinion, Proxmox is worth it for two reasons:
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Easy high-availability setup and control
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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
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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!
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.
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
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’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.
No backup utility like PBS though, thats why I haven’t switched.
Like I said, incus don’t care about your storage.
I’ve never used PBS, I’ve always just rolled my own. I currently keep 7 daily, 4 weekly and 4 monthly. My data mounts are all nfsv4.
Edit: isnt it possible to use pbs with non-proxmox systems?
Yeah it sounds nice but too much time investment for me.
I can install PBS client on any system but it requires manual setup and scheduling which I don’t want to do. When used with Proxmox that’s all handled for me.
Also I don’t think Proxmox cares about storage either, I just use ZFS which is completely standard under the hood.
Also I don’t think Proxmox cares about storage either,
Proxmox forces you to add a “storage area”, which is fine, except you must use their mount path of /mnt/pve/ and you must add NFS tuning switches via pve or they don’t work.
Proxmox is great, I used it for 8 years. But it is also opinionated and doesn’t like non-standard configs.
Oh I see what you mean yeah, I’ve never used NFS before with it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Ganeti development is more or less dead. If you look at the github repo, it hasn’t seen a notable release in 4 years. All that’s been done is a small bugfix patch two months ago by the community.
The project being based on Haskell code also makes it less attractive for new devs.
Stable. :)
Don’t add a layer of abstraction until you need it, or you have the free time to learn it well enough that it won’t cause you problems while you experiment.
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!
