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Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

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Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#61
post #54
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS making snapshotting quick and Proxmox also has a very good backup system. If you want to treat your self-hosted applications as "sheep" (1) , then terraform k8s etc. is a better bet. But if you are happy to manually restore from a backup or snapshot when something goes wrong, or automatically have your LXC container shifted to different hardware if you have a cluster,…

"It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS" No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff. Cephs for clustering (hyperconverged) is very much a first class citizen. I generally only use EXT4 as a filesystem - keep it simple. XFS is lovely too, especially for reflinks if you need them. (1) Wal and Cooch know how to r…

> No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff.

You are correct, it is optional and I should have made that clear. While optional it does have native support for ZFS and takes advantage of ZFS features, like instant snapshotting of LCX containers.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#62

Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)

At the risk of leaking info to any toes I step on w.r.t my home environment, - home assistant - Network Video Recorder - Jellyfin - network management such as ubiquiti or omada etc - vault warden/1pass/other secrets servers - tailscale or wire guard server - build server/k8s test environment - private artifactory or mirror (especially useful if you're using the same distro on a bunch of devices but don't want to over…

I'm just going to repeat a bunch of what hughesjj has already said, but anyway:

OPNSense (as my household's internet interface), Unifi Controller (as my household's primary wifi), Jellyfin, Wireguard, Pi-hole, LMS[0], Frigate NVR (migrating off ZoneMinder, awaiting delivery of a Coral TPU to finalise this), couchdb (as Noteself[1] back-end), nginx (serving a handful of sites for my own entertainment), Mailu[2], Calibre[3], various other in-flight experiments (which Home Assistant will soon become, Bitmagnet DHT scraper).

Most of the above are docker instances hosted on a small number of VMs hosted on two (or sometimes three) physical machines running proxmox.

[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (HN lurker)

[1]: https://noteself.org/

[2]: https://mailu.io

[3]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre or https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-... (I can't remember which)

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#63

Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)

- Home Assistant, Mosquitto, Scrypted, Frigate, rtl_433

- Postgres, Maria, Influx, Grafana

- Plex, Arr suite, Transmission

- Ollama, OpenWebUI

- Web change tracker

- Teslamate

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#64

A bit of a tangent. I've been trying to manage libvirt& Unraid through terraform, but have run into issue after issue. I'm about given up, and will just manage the virtual machines manually... What's the virtualization technology on proxmox? What's the advantage to using something like this as opposed to terraform or salt stack or Ansible?

proxmox is using KVM for virtualization and Linux Containers (LXC) for the containers. I agree that something like terraform and/or ansible would make more sense for an IAC (infrastructure as code) deployment. Most of the people I talk to that use proxmox for a homelab prefer to do things manually and don't bother with any IAC implementation. For work I'm a firm believer in reproducible environments and IAC. We actua…

Proxmox makes that all into a point and click appliance to focus on reliability and doing something with the technology.

Just because someone doesn't use vagrant, libvirt and KVM to spin up local clusters manually, doesn't mean they don't know how.

There is no shortage of Proxmox users who grew up in datacentres from bare metal servers, to virtualization first coming out, and beyond.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#65

Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)

Also just started out few months ago:

- home assistant (just a few currently, more soon) - paperless:absolutely awesome document management system - immich: image management with automatic synchro of my mobile taken images (ML features) - tailscale - StirlingPDF: simple tools for all things PDF

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#66

I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs. With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible. It's also just not amenable to automation or reproduc…

Proxmox doesn’t preclude you from having k8s. You can create VM(s) in Proxmox and then install k8s on them, then run your app workloads in k8s. You do have to treat Proxmox VMs like “pets, not cattle” since they are more difficult to automate, but that’s the same story as if you were managing your k8s host on bare metal too. The benefit with Proxmox-hosted VMs though is that you can use Proxmox for whole-VM backups a…

Something like Talos gets you pretty close to cattle. You just boot a fresh VM from a generic ISO, then run a pre-defined config against it and it will join the cluster. I haven't looked into it but in theory you could pre-bake that config into the boot ISO so adding a new node would literally be just add a new VM using a template. Of course you'd want to remove the node from the cluster cleanly before just deleting it, though.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#67
post #17

I have been looking into setting up my first Proxmox box, here is my take as a newcomer. I wanted to do what I think is a very basic and very common setup: Modem > proxmox box > OPNsense VM > physical wifi router via onboard 10Gb NIC + internal network VMs like OMV etc. The goal is to add a full network filter via OPNsense, and allow access to a media sever and backup etc from the internal network. I see no OPNsense,…

I use Proxmox with an OPNSense VM and have multiple NICs - one is dedicated to the fibre ONT. I also use an external wifi mesh. I have a couple of other vms (unRaid hosting Dockers with sata card passthrough for legacy reasons and a vm for Home Assistant OS) and lots of other LXCs. It works superbly.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#68

I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs. With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible. It's also just not amenable to automation or reproduc…

It's certainly a different model of deployment. I like it, though it does have its warts. However there is a (community) TF module...? https://registry.terraform.io/providers/Telmate/proxmox/late... (I have no experience with it as I typically reach for Ansible). Also, easy-to-install ZFS makes it hard for me to cajol myself into trying something else. And if I want k8s for play time I can always spin up (a/some) VM(…

I've been automating deployment with the bpg Terraform module linked by a sibling (of mine) comment to Proxmox for work.

Neither option is particularly complete, and they have some issues; the bpg one does most of the heavy lifting over SSH rather than using the API due to missing features; it also has some annoying quirks with data structure, such as VM IPs are in multi-dimensional arrays, which means you have to write a bunch of logic to drop localhost and secondary IPs (such as those for Docker virtual networks), and then restructure the output, if you want to use the address to setup your DNS for example.

It's doing what I need now, but I would not call them "gold" or "platinum" grade, probably "silver".

I'd suggest seeing if Proxmox is better-supported in some other IaC tool and fallback to Terraform as a last resort.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxmox doesn’t preclude you from having k8s. You can create VM(s) in Proxmox and then install k8s on them, then run your app workloads in k8s. You do have to treat Proxmox VMs like “pets, not cattle” since they are more difficult to automate, but that’s the same story as if you were managing your k8s host on bare metal too. The benefit with Proxmox-hosted VMs though is that you can use Proxmox for whole-VM backups a…

Something like Talos gets you pretty close to cattle. You just boot a fresh VM from a generic ISO, then run a pre-defined config against it and it will join the cluster. I haven't looked into it but in theory you could pre-bake that config into the boot ISO so adding a new node would literally be just add a new VM using a template. Of course you'd want to remove the node from the cluster cleanly before just deleting…

I run a couple of Talos clusters on Proxmox at home; I haven't templated them yet as they're pretty static clusters, but I suppose you could use a Proxmox Snippet with the config in and point new Talos nodes at it when they boot.

I've also been using a Terraform module for Proxmox at work to deploy stuff, but there's only two, both community modules and neither is gold/platinum tier, good enough for homelab though I'd say.

Re: Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

#70

I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs. With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible. It's also just not amenable to automation or reproduc…

Have you tried incus? https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

I see Incus also uses/used LXC, which has been my main gripe with Proxmox; I'm intimately familiar with building Docker/Podman images but have never built an LXC.

Now that Incus has shutdown the image server[0] is there a decent source for LXC images? I've often struggled to find ready-made images for a lot of things I want to deploy on Proxmox, and if I was to move away, I'd probably want something that uses Docker/Podman for when I don't want to deploy a VM.

[0]https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/important-notice-for-l...

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