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Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

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Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#71

Post by somehnguy »

__jonas wrote: post #60
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?

Some software really prefers to control the whole host, usually highly integrated stuff. Some examples:

- Unifi Controller installs like a half dozen dependencies to run (Mongo, Redis, etc last time I used it), much easier to isolate all that in a VM

- Home Assistant's preferable and most blessed install method is Home Assistant OS, which is an entire distribution. I've run HA in Docker myself before but the experience is like 10x better if you just let it control the OS itself

- I have Plex,Sonarr,Radarr, etc running for media - there is software called Saltbox which integrates all of these things for you so that you don't need to configure 10 different things. Makes it a breeze, but requires a specific version of Ubuntu or you're in unsupported territory (kinda defeating the purpose)

Lots of stuff you can be totally fine just using Docker or installing directly onto the host. But having the bare metal system running Proxmox from that start gives you a ton of flexibility to handle other scenarios.

Worst case you just setup a single VM & run your stuff on it if you have no need for other types of installs. Nothing lost, but you gain flexibility in the future as well as easy backups via snapshotting, etc

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#72

Post by peddling-brink »

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'

Like most useful things, it provides abstraction, simplicity, and organization.

It has a webui with a bunch of features.

If you don't like or want those things, that's fine. This question feels like a "no true power user would...".

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#73

Post by barbuk »

znpy wrote: post #18
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?

From what I know you cannot pass the primary video card to a guest, so you'd need a second video card to pass-through to the guest. But i'd be happy to be proven wrong.

you can pass the primary video card to a lxc guest, I used [1] successfully to do that.

[1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#74

Post by gosub100 »

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 sandbox that lets you play without stepping in the mud or throwing rocks. See my other post in this thread for what happens when you try to do it the hard way.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#75

Post by sekh60 »

maldev wrote: post #54
sekh60 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry again, is this like nVidia MIG? That seems to be the more current technology. Not sure if the host can retain a slice though.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#76

Post by sokoloff »

somehnguy wrote: post #71
__jonas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some software really prefers to control the whole host, usually highly integrated stuff. Some examples: - Unifi Controller installs like a half dozen dependencies to run (Mongo, Redis, etc last time I used it), much easier to isolate all that in a VM - Home Assistant's preferable and most blessed install method is Home Assistant OS, which is an entire distribution. I've run HA in Docker myself before but the experien…

Easy backups via snapshotting is quick to say, but has an outsized benefit IME. My go-to approach for keeping many of my machines up to date is now scheduled apt get update; apt get upgrade and relying on scheduled backups in the unlikely event that goes awry. I don't have to worry about package interdependencies across machines.

For major upgrades, I may go a step further and do a manual snapshot before upgrading and then decide whether or not to commit (usually) or rollback (easy, when needed).

The (emotional) security provided by this is nice, as is the time-savings (after initial time expense to learn and setup the base proxmox infrastructure).

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#77

Post by maldev »

sekh60 wrote: post #75
maldev wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry again, is this like nVidia MIG? That seems to be the more current technology. Not sure if the host can retain a slice though.

Kind of, i'm not to familiar with the enterprise gpu sharing, but I believe that requires hardware support for it on the GPU to split up contexts for the OS. Whereas the GPU-P solution works on any GPU and is vendor agnostic as it's done on the OS/Processor level. It's really cool and I have no idea how they can ship this since it does trample on the enterprise tech pretty substantially. But I belive it's a byproduct of Microsoft wanting to compete on the datacenter level and it gives them a killer feature for Azure, and as a byproduct it entered as a semi undocumented feature into consumer hyper-v.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#78

Post by mccoyc »

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

It works, but anytime you have custom networking or more complex cloud-init configs, you'll have to go into "snippets" territory or referring to files in a local filesystem of the host. They don't have API support for making snippets the last time I checked. Where I ran into this was when trying to set up hosts with Terraform on Proxmox VE (which works well itself too).

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#79

Post by johntash »

oriettaxx wrote: post #70
kiney wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

exactly! I try to do everything without Ansible: cloud-init is pretty powerful, too, but I am reaching the 64k limit, so sooner then later will go "back" to Ansible.

If you're already familiar with Ansible, what about doing some stuff with cloud-init and then having cloud-init trigger a local ansible run? Then you don't have to worry about running into the limit.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#80

Post by bkallus »

oriettaxx wrote: post #40
secabeen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all done as blind execution of remote code. Bleh.

yes, but come on: you download it and quickly check yourself

Assuming that the script you download is the same as the script that curl|bash downloads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231128113854/https://www.idont...

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