From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by wao0uuno » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #24

dizhn wrote: post #8

Sylve looks like a decent project with a promising future but this article really doesn't explain why they picked it over Proxmox at all. They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it.

> 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…

What's wrong with systemd? It's easy to use and works well.

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

#82

Post by ThomIves » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

I was very happy to read this one. I do use ProxMox, and I have very few issues with it, but perhaps it would be worth the investigation.

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

#83

Post by matifali » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

Any plans or thoughts for? Terraform Provider? I use Proxmox as my infrastructure provider and heavily rely on Terraform to provision resources.

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

#84

Post by arch1e » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

matifali wrote: post #83

Any plans or thoughts for? Terraform Provider? I use Proxmox as my infrastructure provider and heavily rely on Terraform to provision resources.

Yes! We're planning out terraform provider, It should land in v0.2.5, we're at v0.2.3 now.

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

#85

Post by justsomehnguy » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

evanjrowley wrote: post #21

justsomehnguy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sylve can support ZFS-on-root rollbacks better than hacking it into Proxmo Can you explain your use case when you absolutely can't provide a separate M.2 drive solely for the OS?

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.

... and with a separate drive (or even partition) you can just use the LVM snapshots with an any file system.

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

#86

Post by xoa » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

arch1e wrote: post #75

xoa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure you'll see this so late but just wanted to say I really appreciate the reply and learning about this project. I've been working to switch myself and various places away from perpetual ESXi licenses as it finally starts really getting old, and while I'm thankful Proxmox exists I've always loved FreeBSD (was kinda bummed when TrueNAS moved from it) and Proxmox can be irksome. Even at such an early stage Sylve already looks like it's clicking nicely. Excited to see next release and what comes in the future.