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From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

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Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#21

Post by evanjrowley »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #14
evanjrowley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without looking at the Sylve docs, I'll conjecture that it has deeper integration with ZFS. With a foundation on FreeBSD, there is a likelihood Sylve can support ZFS-on-root rollbacks better than hacking it into Proxmox. A rollback capability is why I'm looking for Proxmox alternatives. In the Linux world, Talos Linux and IncusOS provide A/B updates which achieve a similar rollback capability. With something based on…

> Sylve can support ZFS-on-root rollbacks better than hacking it into Proxmo Can you explain your use case when you absolutely can't provide a separate M.2 drive solely for the OS?

Regardless of the number of drives available, you gain an advantage when your file system can leverage snapshots to roll backwards or forwards. There are other Linux-native filesystems that can provide this capability too, but many admins prefer ZFS because the full range of capabilities is unparelleled.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#22

Post by dizhn »

EnigmaCurry wrote: post #16
Cyph0n wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes unification can be an advantage. I run Proxmox at home, but now that I have been drinking the NixOS koolaid over the past 2 years, all of my homelab problems suddenly look like Nix-shaped nails.

Same. Here's how I scratch the NixOS itch on Proxmox and/or libvirt[1]. One interface for both targets. [1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template

That feature list looks really good. It would actually be really nice to standardize the guest operating systems in such a way.

I actually have a few hosts that only run docker. I might be able to test with those.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#23

Post by Havoc »

evanjrowley wrote: post #21
justsomehnguy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sylve can support ZFS-on-root rollbacks better than hacking it into Proxmo Can you explain your use case when you absolutely can't provide a separate M.2 drive solely for the OS?

Regardless of the number of drives available, you gain an advantage when your file system can leverage snapshots to roll backwards or forwards. There are other Linux-native filesystems that can provide this capability too, but many admins prefer ZFS because the full range of capabilities is unparelleled.

Perhaps I'm missing your point, but proxmox+lxc on zfs storage works fine in proxmox? If just looks like any other storage in proxmox and on commandline you've got all the usual zfs tools

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#24

Post by TacticalCoder »

dizhn wrote: post #8

Sylve looks like a decent project with a promising future but this article really doesn't explain why they picked it over Proxmox at all. They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it.

> They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it.

A huge, totally obvious, advantage is that FreeBSD isn't using systemd. I'm now nearly systemd-free, if not for Proxmox. But my VMs are systemd free. And, by definition, my containers too (where basically the entire point is that there's a PID 1 for the service and that PID 1, in a container is not systemd).

So the last piece missing for me is getting rid of Proxmox because Proxmox is using systemd.

I was thinking about going straight to FreeBSD+bhyve (the hypervisor) but that felt a bit raw. FreeBSD+Sylve (using bhyve under the hood) seems to be, at long last, my way out of systemd.

I've got several servers at home with Proxmox but I never, on purpose, relied too much on Proxmox: I kept it to the bare minimum. I create VMs and use cloudinit and tried to have most of it automated and always made it with the idea of getting rid of Promox.

I've got nothing against Proxmox but fuck systemd. Just fuck that system.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#25

Post by TacticalCoder »

KaiserPro wrote: post #7

What does Sylve provide that proxmox doesn't? Or better, how does it do it better than proxmox? This isn't to say that proxmox is the best thing since sliced bread, I'm curious as to what makes sylve better, is it the API?

> What does Sylve provide that proxmox doesn't?

A Un*x system that doesn't use systemd as an init system.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#27

Post by wolvoleo »

This is really interesting. I've played with bhyve before but I didn't realise anyone actually used it in anger. And that people had written such great tooling around it.

My home lab still uses ESXi 8. But it needs something new and I was looking at proxmox. However I may give this a try first.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#28

Post by arch1e »

dizhn wrote: post #8

Sylve looks like a decent project with a promising future but this article really doesn't explain why they picked it over Proxmox at all. They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it.

OP here. One thing we mentioned in the blog but probably didn’t emphasize enough is how deeply ZFS is integrated into the UI.

With Sylve, you rarely need to touch the CLI. Snapshots, datasets, ZVOLs, even flashing images directly to ZVOLs, it’s all handled from the UI in a straightforward way.

That tight ZFS integration also lets us build more flexible backup workflows. You can back up VMs, jails, or entire datasets to any remote machine that supports SSH + ZFS. This is powered by Zelta (https://zelta.space) (which is embedded directly into the Go backend), so it’s built-in rather than something you bolt on.

In Proxmox, you can achieve similar things, but it’s less intuitive and usually involves setting up additional components like Proxmox Backup Server.

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#29

Post by MisterTea »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #17
MisterTea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are unsure of bhyve's abilities then why not test yourself? Speculation and guessing about stability or testing is useless without seeing if it works in your application.

> If you are unsure of bhyve's abilities then why not test yourself? It is not possible to come to a conclusion about everything in the world yourself "from scratch". No one has the time to try out everything themselves. Some filteration process needs to be applied to prevent wasting your finite time. That is why you ask for recommendations of hotels, restaurants, travel destinations, good computer brands, software a…

The phrasing of your questions is the problem. They are uninformed, too general, and assuming. The last sentence reads as if you outright dismiss bhyve because YOU can't imagine it was tested thoroughly.

> It is not possible to come to a conclusion about everything in the world yourself "from scratch". No one has the time to try out everything themselves. Some filteration process needs to be applied to prevent wasting your finite time.

It's totally possible when you know what your application requires but you didn't state anything.

> Someone just said bhyve does not support nested virtualization (useful input !).

What nested applications are you planning to run?

Re: From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab

#30

Post by arch1e »

gcifuentes wrote: post #2

Bhyve doesn't feature nested virt though.

That’s true, bhyve doesn’t support nested virtualization right now.

In practice though, most setups don’t actually need it if you’re running workloads directly on the host.

Also, if your goal is testing or simulating clusters, you can already run Sylve inside jails. That gives you multiple isolated “nodes” on a single machine without needing nested virt. We have a guide for it here: https://sylve.io/guides/advanced-topics/jailing-sylve/

So you can still experiment with things like clustering, networking, failure scenarios, etc., just using jails instead of spinning up hypervisors inside VMs.

Nested virt is still useful for specific cases like testing other hypervisors or running Firecracker inside VMs, but for most Sylve-style setups it hasn’t really been a blocker.

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