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How's Proxmox for home use on a single node? I've got the free ESXi license for stuff at home (I use it at work, so I figured I might as well use what I know at home, too), but, uh, with the Broadcom acquisition, I'm feeling like I need an escape plan.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:36
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:07 |
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Potato Salad posted:you could use proxmox at home but you won't be learning any skills that are useful for your career imo I'm really not worried about picking up VMware skills. I've already done things like written a custom VM build system to connect to it using the SOAP and REST APIs and build VM templates and deploy them to VMs, developed an integration for it for our CMDB, etc. Like I said, I'm using the free ESXi license because I already use it at work and I'm familiar with it. Though, these days, I do a lot less with VMware directly, since I've been doing a lot of security policy work. SlowBloke posted:At this point in the post acquisition stage, getting esxi skills today would be like like getting novell groupware knowledge in the early two ks. Broadcom is going to kill esxi no if no buts, it's just a matter of time. Also, this. I don't see VMware doing well under Broadcom with the changes they've announced, between the licensing changes and selling off all the workstation products. Mainly, I'm just wondering whether Proxmox is reliable and maintained well enough to replace ESXi at home at this point. I've never run into it in the wild, so I have zero experience with it, but at least on paper, it sounds like the platform I'd want to move to (free, supports Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD guest VMs, has some sort of web UI for easy admin tasks, has an API, supports ZFS for VM storage, supports device passthrough so I can pass my GPU through to my Plex VM).
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Jan 5, 2024 23:37
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Potato Salad posted:I meant go learn KVM Eh, if I were thinking about going with KVM directly, I'd just use bhyve instead. I like FreeBSD more than I do Linux, plus it natively supports ZFS. Twerk from Home posted:I have been skimming the Proxmox support forums, it's a mix of hobbyists that have no idea what they're doing running into predictable problems with their stupid home setups, and pros with what sounds like a reasonable, modern environment experiencing a bunch of problems with HA. Hmmm. Good to know. I'd only have it on a single node, but that's still good info to have. I've mostly found the people with broken setups who don't know what they're doing, so it's good info seeing what actual problems it has. Thanks!
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Jan 6, 2024 00:21
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Broadcom has officially killed free ESXi now. Not that this is a surprise to anybody at this point, but there it is.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:11
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Well, I switched my home host over to Proxmox. Some of it's a bit clunkier (like the UI doesn't seem to have any way to assign roles to groups, so I had to do that via the CLI, and the VM creation process has a lot of extra stuff to click that would be nice to be able to set as defaults), but so far, it seems to work OK. I do appreciate that they offer OpenID connect as an auth mechanism and ACME for cert generation. Those were relatively easy to set up, except for some of their field names being a little confusing. I guess I'll see whether I get any weird behavior or instability over the long term, but at least from my initial impressions on a single-host setup, this seems to be usable.
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Feb 18, 2024 20:50
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:07 |
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HalloKitty posted:Windows guests? I hear those can be an issue with Proxmox Funny you should ask. I just tried Windows 11 last night since I only keep it around for the rare occasions I can't do something on my Mac. Windows seems to work, but it's more of a pain than on VMware. The VMware tools are miles ahead of the VirtIO/QEMU/SPICE poo poo (at least on Windows). I actually had to stop using SPICE and go back to unaccelerated video because SPICE kept freezing* on me. Other than that, and the wonky process of adding a second optical drive to the VM with the VirtIO drivers so that the Windows installer picks them up and can use the hard drive, it seemed fine. I haven't tried anything super extensive with Windows, though. *Something I found about Proxmox when dealing with a hung Windows 11 instance from SPICE issues. If you try to gracefully shut down a VM with the Proxmox UI's "Shutdown" option and that doesn't work (it gets stuck), the force-kill "Stop" option won't work because it can't get a lock on the VM. You need to open up the status of the shutdown operation and cancel it before you can stop the VM. I'd expect the stop operation would kill the shutdown operation on the way, but apparently not. Edit: Oh, one other weird thing I discovered that makes Proxmox fine for home use, but not as good as VMware for enterprise use: what SSO set up through Proxmox actually gets you. You can do most things in the GUI (VM creation, control, etc.), but not everything (hardware passthrough, for example, or running Proxmox updates, since it pops up a shell to run apt-get dist-upgrade), and not everything can be done in the GUI (the only way I was able to figure out how to assign roles to groups was via the CLI). For anything else, you need a user authed by PAM. And, I mean, you can set PAM up with AD or whatever just like you can with any Linux host, but VMware doesn't make you gently caress around with any of that. With VMware, an admin user is an admin user, full stop. With Proxmox, there's a material difference between a non-PAM user (like my OpenID user) and a PAM user, even if the non-PAM user has full admin privileges in Proxmox. Kreeblah fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 18:46
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