Hey guys!
I have recently joined the selfhosting world after many years of thinking about it. Currently running casaOS with an assortment of containers. Mainly use nextcloud, paperlessNGX, and general file storage.
I am thinking of creating a proxmox cluster. Just wanted to ask for those who do. Is it worth it? And what services are you guys running?
I was thinking of using it for NAS, and a window VM and run other random things that I don’t know yet.
Looking into grabbing some Lenovo M715q. Found a decent deal.
Thank you all in advance.
The primary reason to virtualize is to maximize the “bang for your buck” on your hardware. Containers are great, but have their limits.
So long as you have a desire to learn it (and the budget), I say dive in with Proxmox and see how you can put that hardware to use. VMWare ESXi is more common in a business/enterprise setting, but costs money to for anything beyond the basic functionality after the evaluation period.
Basic functionality is probably good for most people. I believe the biggest limit I hit was for the resources. Believe it was 8 vCore /8GB RAM on a single VM. Most of the other vSphere/vSAN and orchestrator stuff is probably beyond home lab needs
I picked up some systems with 16gb each and it’s a Ryzen 5 2400. I think it should be good for my needs… hopefully.
Oh I was saying with the free mode of esxi there are limits placed on the VM resources, not the host. It can be a bit of a pain to get the updates and patches if you don’t pay for the license though. If you get a enterprise server (dell r730 etc) then you’d be able to get the custom dell package from their site for updates but it’s a pain lol
Depending on what you are trying to run those should be an okay start
Ah ok. I’ll cross that bridge if I ever get there. This is just more to tinker and it’ll be a glorified file server in the end of the day…haha
But just wanted to learn it and see where it goes l.
Ok great! I’m doing it to just learn and tinker with. Thank you!
Fwiw as an SRE specialized in infrastructure for large companies, the primary limits of containers are not about resources, they’re about isolation. It’s hard to beat CPU hardware virtualization (VMs) for proper isolation with decent performance, but for maximizing resource utilization, containers are actually better if you aren’t running untrusted code like a cloud provider. Which is why companies like Google use them at their scale. And in fact, at least for long enough for it to end up in books, ran their VMs through their container orchestration tools. Virtualization has a penalty because you’re running multiple kernels and switching back and forth etc.