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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

#51

Post by KaiserPro »

arch1e wrote: post #35
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?

OP here. It’s less about Sylve doing something Proxmox can’t do, and more about a bunch of QoL improvements that come from us being heavy Proxmox users and building what we felt was missing. A few concrete things: ZFS-first UX: Not just "ZFS as storage”, but everything built around it. Snapshots, clones, ZVOLs, replication, all cleanly exposed in the UI without dropping to CLI. Simple backups without extra infra: Any…

Excellent, this makes a lot of sense. I'll try it out

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

#52

Post by hedora »

redserk wrote: post #37
TacticalCoder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a w…

It's not silly at all.

I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill".

In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to various systemd related issues. (For large values of N.)

I assume that means anything built on top of it is flaky + not stable enough for production use.

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

#53

Post by hedora »

arch1e wrote: post #35
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?

OP here. It’s less about Sylve doing something Proxmox can’t do, and more about a bunch of QoL improvements that come from us being heavy Proxmox users and building what we felt was missing. A few concrete things: ZFS-first UX: Not just "ZFS as storage”, but everything built around it. Snapshots, clones, ZVOLs, replication, all cleanly exposed in the UI without dropping to CLI. Simple backups without extra infra: Any…

I get the impression bhyve does all that stuff too. Is sylve basically just a thin GUI wrapper on top?

(That'd be amazing if it's possible to do stuff like dump configs + check them into git from the cli, then stand them up on any bhve/sylve box later...)

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

#54

Post by hedora »

BeepInABox wrote: post #34
TacticalCoder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Sylve provide that proxmox doesn't? A Un*x system that doesn't use systemd as an init system.

Right, so nothing?

In the same way as not releasing angry bees into your cube farm is doing nothing, yes!!

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

#55

Post by vablings »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #25
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.

Great to see we are back to counter jerking systemd after years of great work...

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

#56

Post by redserk »

hedora wrote: post #52
redserk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a w…

It's not silly at all. I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill". In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to…

It absolutely is silly. I’ve been responsible for managing low-thousands of Linux servers with systemd and it’s standardized a lot of things that otherwise would’ve been a lot of bespoke scripts.

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

#57

Post by pdntspa »

hedora wrote: post #52
redserk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a w…

It's not silly at all. I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill". In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to…

I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.

I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.

Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence

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

#58

Post by h4kunamata »

>A lot of our week is made up of the same kinds of small tasks: provision a VM, tweak storage settings, pass through a device, replicate a dataset, share a file, test an image, throw the machine away, do it again. None of that is exciting.

All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!!

At no moment I heard automation, if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked.

I run Proxmox at home for my homelab. I used to use VMs and now I have fully adopted Proxmox LXC containers (I hate Docker). I use Ansible to automate everything.

Last night I wanted to setup a notification service called Gotify, the Ansible playbook must:

1. Create a LXC container with specified resources

2. Prepare the system, network and what not

3. Give me a fully operational LXC and service running, go to the browser and voila.

All of that by running one command line, so now I can deploy it over and over.

I have setup a LXC container running Radarr, qBittorrent, Sonarr, Jackett, WireGuard VPN via Proton VPN, Iptables firewall aka kill-switch.

All of what you just read running within a LXC container fully automated via Ansible, OP is doing everything manually.

Even if I was running Sylve, Ansible would be doing the whole automation stuff.

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

#59

Post by arch1e »

h4kunamata wrote: post #58

>A lot of our week is made up of the same kinds of small tasks: provision a VM, tweak storage settings, pass through a device, replicate a dataset, share a file, test an image, throw the machine away, do it again. None of that is exciting. All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!! At no moment I heard automation, if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked. I run Proxmo…

Author of Sylve here, and I helped deploy the setup in the post.

> All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!!

Their setup is mostly working on embedded stuff, and this involves some amount of moving VM disk images around, sometimes they run different software within the same VM disk, so that means ZFS properties need to be tweaked accordingly (compression, recordsize, etc). This is a lot easier to do with a UI than it is with CLI, and the UI is pretty good at showing you what’s going on. Now I'm all for automating stuff, but there's no clear pattern here to automate away,

Now regarding automation in Sylve, you can create a template out of Sylve (with networking, storage, CPU config etc.) and then deploy that template as many times as you want (from the UI), last I checked proxmox only allows you to clone from template one at a time.

What I do is pretty similar to what you mention, but I don't really use ansible since on FreeBSD if it's in the ports tree its one command (after base system is set up) which is `pkg install -y `. And your entire stack (from your list), can be done with one command each. The only thing I see that would need a bit setup would be the wireguard vpn, but even that is pretty straightforward under FreeBSD (so you can do it with a jail and no need for a VM).

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

#60

Post by unethical_ban »

Havoc wrote: post #23
evanjrowley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like tooling and ease of use, integration with the overlay.
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