Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

tteck.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 113 posts

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#51

Post by lostlogin »

latentcall wrote: post #35
gosub100 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. I have been running my own NAS the hard way: FreeBSD, ZFS, manual samba/NFS shares, dhcp+gateway+firewall, PXE Boot, Jellyfin (can't remember if it's in a jail or not). All this stuff is a huge, utter PITA and never works quite right. - I have to manually check the zpool periodically to see if there are faults. I went about 30d with a DEGRADED disk before I realized it, turns out it was a bad cable but if…

I did all this with TrueNAS and nothing ever worked right so I just bought a Synology and I haven’t had issues since. There is real benefit I think in the manual approach, you’ll learn so much. But at some point I just want to watch stuff on TV or want my Mom in another state to watch too.

As much as I’d like to go TrueNAS or similar, it’s hard to beat the ‘just works’ approach. I’m a very happy 1821 owner. It’s an amazing unit.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#52

Post by znpy »

gosub100 wrote: post #30
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

100% agree. I have been running my own NAS the hard way: FreeBSD, ZFS, manual samba/NFS shares, dhcp+gateway+firewall, PXE Boot, Jellyfin (can't remember if it's in a jail or not). All this stuff is a huge, utter PITA and never works quite right. - I have to manually check the zpool periodically to see if there are faults. I went about 30d with a DEGRADED disk before I realized it, turns out it was a bad cable but if…

> I went about 30d with a DEGRADED disk before I realized it, turns out it was a bad cable but if another disk failed I would have been hosed.

Skill issue. You lack monitoring. The basic prometheus node exporter and alertmanager would be sufficient:

    # curl -s http://localhost:9100/metrics | grep zpool_state
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="degraded",zpool="storage"} 0
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="faulted",zpool="storage"} 0
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="offline",zpool="storage"} 0
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="online",zpool="storage"} 1
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="removed",zpool="storage"} 0
    node_zfs_zpool_state{state="unavail",zpool="storage"} 0
You can easily alert on such metrics.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#53

Post by [deleted] »

kube-system wrote: post #39
fb03 wrote: post #24

Serious question: What is the advantage of Proxmox for power linux users that can run a debian or ubuntu server box + KVM ? I'm always reading stuff about people using proxmox but don't really understand its 'edge'

It's a product instead of a box of parts. My brain only has so much cognitive power. If I'm spinning up a VM, I'm trying to accomplish some other work.

[deleted]

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#54

Post by maldev »

sekh60 wrote: post #43
maldev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to use Hyper-v, you can use GPU-P(Gpu Partitoning) where hyper-v will pass through the GPU to the VM and share it, it's not some emulated adapter, it's genuinely the real GPU and runs natively and you can share it across multiple VM's and host. Linux has NOTHING that can compete with the feature.

But a Windows user, so I could be completely off base, but isn't GPU-P just VFIO under the hood? I don't know about Proxmox, but this is completely supported by OpenStack and KVM.

No, it uses the hypervisor to implement a scheduler for the GPU between the different vm's and gives them access to it. VFIO on linux requires passing the entire GPU to only a single VM and making it so the host doesn't have access.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#55

Post by skazazes »

nonane wrote: post #12

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc) Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

I actually use Proxmox on my main PC. Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, RTX 4070, AMD 6500XT. The two GPU's are each passed to a Windows and Debian VM respectively, and each also gets a USB card passed for convenience. I run half a dozen other VM's off of it hosting various portions of the standard homelab media/automation stacks.

Anecdotally, it's a very effective setup when combined with a solid KVM. I like keeping my main Debian desktop and the hypervisor separate because it keeps me from borking my whole lab with an accidental rm -rf.

It is possible to pass all of a systems GPU's to VM's, using exclusively the web interface/shell for administration, but it can cause some headaches when there are issues unrelated to the system itself. For example, if I lose access to the hypervisor over the network, getting the system back online can be a bit of a PITA as you can no longer just plug it into a screen to update any static network configuration. My current solution to this is enabling DHCP on Proxmox and managing the IP with static mappings at the router level.

There are a few other caveats to passing all of the GPU's that I could detail further, but as a low impact setup (like running emulators on a TV) its should work fairly well. I have also found that Proxmox plays well with mini PC's. Besides the desktop, I run it on an Intel NUC as well as a Topton mini PC with a bunch of high-speed NICS as a router. I cluster them without enabling the high availability features in order to unify the control plane for the three systems into one interface. It all comes together into a pretty slick system

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#56

Post by znpy »

fb03 wrote: post #24

Serious question: What is the advantage of Proxmox for power linux users that can run a debian or ubuntu server box + KVM ? I'm always reading stuff about people using proxmox but don't really understand its 'edge'

it makes hard stuff simple.

yeah you can write weird shell script and re-implement hot vm migration (moving a physical machine from one physical host to another without shutting it down) but what's the point, really? you might as well use proxmox.

if you ever actually need to see how it's done you could just see what's proxmox doing under the hood (it's open source after all)

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#58

Post by skazazes »

oriettaxx wrote: post #44

I don't see anything on cloud-init (did I miss some link?) while it works perfectly in Proxmox, see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cloud-Init_Support

Although its supported, its not well documented enough to be a good way to learn about cloud-init in my experience. I tried configuring a K3's cluster across three proxmox nodes via cloud-init to get some exposure to it and eventually gave up and just configured them manually

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#59

Post by kiney »

oriettaxx wrote: post #44

I don't see anything on cloud-init (did I miss some link?) while it works perfectly in Proxmox, see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cloud-Init_Support

Using cloudinit in proxmox is godsend. I can spin up a fresh linux vm and login with my ssh key (and ansible) in less than a minute.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#60

Post by __jonas »

nonane wrote: post #12

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc) Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

Can someone explain why it is useful to do do virtualization at all when you just want to run a small amount of things like this?

I have a ubuntu server install running on an old laptop to do very basic background jobs, backups, automation, run some containers etc. – am I missing something by not using a hypervisor? What are the benefits?

Post reply on HN