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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

#71

Post by h4kunamata »

gonzalohm wrote: post #64
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…

How many times are you redeploying your homelab stuff? I also run lxc containers and thought about automating deployments but in my one year running proxmox I have only deployed each container once. If anything breaks I have PBS running to recover a previous backup. I don't see myself having to repeat this process more than once or twice

>How many times

It less about how many times and more about used to automate everything, spend less time doing boring things and more time doing fun stuff.

For example, when I first deployed a Jellyfin LXC container with GPU and what not, the container itself hosts nothing, Proxmox mounts the NFS shared from TrueNAS to it, and it uses a local NVMe for transcoding.

And yet, novice me picked a small storage size, 5GB or something because I only run Debian Netinst which uses 200MB of ram and 0.00001% CPU. Debian Netinst itself requires what 1-2GB of disk??

Back to your question, I had to redeploy another Jellyfin container coz it ran out of disk space with:

1. the GPU passthrough

2. mount all the NFS shares once the LXC is up

3. the transcode folder

4. rsync from TrueNAS and restore the metadata with all the movies and what not.

Had I planned to do it?? Nope.

One command line and I have a brand new Jellyfin LXC with much bigger storage, and working like nothing happened, fully automated from my PC via Ansible.

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

#72

Post by h4kunamata »

arch1e wrote: post #69
h4kunamata wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, based on your comment and others, Sylve seems to be heavily GUI for everything. There is nothing wrong with that but if an user cannot perform the same tasks via CLI, I see that as a big blocker for a project to be fully adopted with exceptions. OPNSense, there is zero reasons to manage the whole network and what not via CLI, GUI makes life so much easier. I would hate it having to do everything via CLI. The o…

That’s fair, but Sylve isn’t GUI-only. We’re API-first, the UI is just a client on top. We already ship Swagger docs with the code (docs/ on the repo), so everything the UI does is exposed and usable programmatically today. Right now we’re still early (v0.2), so the CLI/SDK pieces aren’t fully there yet, but that’s what we’re building next. Before v0.4 the plan is: * a proper CLI for scripting * a well-defined API li…

Noice, I know I sound like a hater haha but I am just curious.

This is the first time I heard about it, I will check its documentation later. Workplace flagged it as grayware, go figure haha

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

#73

Post by h4kunamata »

cheema33 wrote: post #70
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…

> if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked. This x 10. Ansible and OpenTofu/Terraform is where it is at. And you can use Claude/Codex with that setup.

> Terraform I am not and do not intend in becoming a Kubernetes expert, many companies run Kubernetes and they don't know why they do it, some hypes make things so much harder.

But I do have a single cluster at home which allowed me to learn both Kubernetes and Terraform, I also hate Docker so much that I prefer to convert a Dockerfile into a Terraform template and voila, I do not use it to run my stuff.

I enjoy Terraform very much with Terragrunt. Terraform alone is too messy, Terragrunt makes the house cleaner.

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

#74

Post by xoa »

xoa wrote: post #41
arch1e wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you'…

Too late to edit, but just as a note for anyone else who gets confused by my post: I was not paying careful enough attention and missed/misread the "backups" bit in the parent post, completely my fault. As far as I can tell from reading through the (quite pleasant!) documentation [0], Sylve does not (at least for now) support any sort of network storage for direct use as the VM backing store, though as it is FreeBSD underneath it's presumably doable to get something going from the command line. I'd thought they'd somehow managed to set something up so you could directly use another ZFS system via SSH as the primary backing store with management which would be pretty awesome. It still looks like a beautiful design, but since I'm pretty invested right now in separating out storage into its own hardware vs where compute happens it'd be hard to setup nodes as AIO for the near future at least here.

Still an awesome project to learn about and I hope it's successful.

----

0: https://sylve.io/docs/

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

#75

Post by arch1e »

xoa wrote: post #74
xoa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you'…

Too late to edit, but just as a note for anyone else who gets confused by my post: I was not paying careful enough attention and missed/misread the "backups" bit in the parent post, completely my fault. As far as I can tell from reading through the (quite pleasant!) documentation [0], Sylve does not (at least for now) support any sort of network storage for direct use as the VM backing store, though as it is FreeBSD…

It's funny, I love how FreeBSD manages iSCSI even though I have only used it a few times, I put it in my to-do list but never really got around to writing a UI for it. Come next release (v0.3.0) I will definitely integrate it because as your put it's quite necessary to have that as a way to isolate storage from the main system.

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

#76

Post by h4kunamata »

evanjrowley wrote: post #10
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?

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…

See, people get things mixed and blame the tool.

Folks using TrueNAS or unRAID for backup instead of safe keeping, and then get mad when everything goes sideways and the data is gone. Your NAS must have a backup elsewhere, snapshot and what not won't save you if everything goes RIP.

ZFS is redundancy and redundancy only, but people see ZFS as some sort of backup. That is silly and wrong.

>A rollback capability is why I'm looking for Proxmox alternatives.

Your VMs and LXC container should have an automated backup. Proxmox itself takes a second to clean install it.

I had to change the motherboard and had to literraly install Proxmox 9.1 from scratch. BUT.... before doing that, I checked the LXC backups sent to a TrueNAS spool in mirror for safe keeping.

Reinstalled Proxmox, mounted the NFS share on Proxmox and voila, all the LXC containers were restored and started like nothing happened.

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

#77

Post by meitham »

The article promotes the value of UI for the infrastructure by touching on ZFS. But in this age of Ai, what I’m really looking for is a good api or cli one can let LLM drives. I basically care more about using my infrastructure than how to create it. I know proxmox can do this, but I wish there was a nixos like system where all my VMs are in one file I can verify between LLM making the change and deployment

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

#78

Post by evanjrowley »

h4kunamata wrote: post #76
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…

See, people get things mixed and blame the tool. Folks using TrueNAS or unRAID for backup instead of safe keeping, and then get mad when everything goes sideways and the data is gone. Your NAS must have a backup elsewhere, snapshot and what not won't save you if everything goes RIP. ZFS is redundancy and redundancy only, but people see ZFS as some sort of backup. That is silly and wrong. >A rollback capability is why…

As a Proxmox Backup Server user... I still want ZFS roots with native rollback support. FreeBSD is more likely to execute this well vs. Proxmox.

I'm talking about this, basically: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/howto-zfs-m...

There have since been implementations for Linux but no distribution is designed to support them.

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

#79

Post by evanjrowley »

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

I'm talking about this, basically: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/howto-zfs-m...

There have since been implementations for Linux but no distribution is designed to support them.

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

#80

Post by jollymonATX »

When I first read this I was like wow bad choice vs sticking w proxmox but then I reflected a bit on my rashness. A tight zfs L1 w/o systemd actually does sound interesting. I'm going to wipe a machine and give it a spin and see for myself. Could be interesting!
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