With the recent Proxmox 9 release, many of us have the upgrade ahead or already done. What about you, and how do you generally approach updating your services? Which other updates are you looking forward to or is it just an annoying chore?
Also the usual - let us know what you are currently working on, what problems you are encountering and what you are excited about.
As for updates, I update my machines semi-regularly with Ansible. The Proxmox 9 update was unspectacular (good thing!), I just had to change some things in my Promox-post-install automation (nag bar removal and package sources). I still plan to get a merge request based update process for my containers as mentioned here but I’m just not there yet. That guide was also posted on reddit recently and got some traction.
I also spent some time yesterday to organize my nginx logs, they basically all got their own folder in /var/log/nginx with their own access log file by adding access_log /var/log/nginx/$server_name/access.log vhost_combined; to each config. Error log file paths can’t contain variables so I kept them in the default file so far.
Recently enabled wireguard (easy setting in my FritzBox router) and stopped exposing some of my services to the internet. That process isn’t finished yet though as I’ll need to switch to wildcard certificates in order to keep valid SSL for the now local-only services.
I have never understood the hype surrounding proxmox. What makes proxmox so irreplaceable?
In the virtualisation world you have the expensive big boy who everyone now hates ESX by Broadcom (was VMware), the expensive wannabe big boy that everyone hates Hyper-V by Microsoft, and a gazillion others that use Qemu or zen as a base and puts a shiny coat of UI over it.
Proxmox is in that last category. A pretty interface over an open source underlay at a decent price (if you want to pay the subscription).
Super reliable virtualization and management features. Snapshots, auto backups, live migrations across physical hosts, high availability are what I like the most.
I’ve tried it a few times, never stuck. I guess it’s just convenience, it is a well integrated piece of software, especially if you use both LXC and VMs. Personally I keep using virt-manager and Cockpit.
I find VMs to be unbearably sloe compared to a container. They just feel so heavy. I get the extra security layer, is that really why people are doing it or is there some other reason?
The easy ui is good for those who aren’t living in the terminal all the time.
I used proxmox for nearly 8 years before switching to only containers. It was fine.
Extra security and full isolation with its own kernel, so you can load kernel modules and such.
Also can run Windows in a VM when needed, or MacOS.
VMs are basically just as fast as containers, and the RAM overhead from a lightweight Linux VM is very small.
Being able to choose the OS and kernel is also important. I would not want my hypervisor machine to load GPU kernel modules, especially not on an older LTS kernel (which often don’t support the latest hardware). Passing the GPU to a VM ensures stability of the host machine, with the flexibility to choose whatever kernel I need for specific hardware. This alongside running entirely different OSes (like *BSD, Windows :(, etc) is pretty useful for some services.
Portability, isolation, the ability to run pretty much anything inside. They do consume more resources, but if they’re that much slower then there’s probably something wrong in your setup.
Not everything runs in a container.
Same here, though more out of lack of control over the host. Libvirt works on basically any distro, and you can easily configure whatever Linux distro you like best for running it. I can’t configure my boot process the way I want on Proxmox (at least not without learning/sidestepping its “convenience” tools/setup).
I moved to proxmox earlier this year and it quickly became a huge deal for me.
One nice thing is that I can easily create lxc containers for each service that has exactly what that service needs. Each service lives in a container that acts a lot like bare metal.
A second nice thing is it’s really easy to administer everything remotely. All your machines end up accessible through the proxmox interface, and you can hop into virtual machines or lxc containers via the web.
A third thing is you can easily handle hot standby and backups through an easy UI.
Totally changed the game for me.
If you know Linux or are willing to learn, it is very easy to use. If not, it’s going to be a bit of a chore. Some things are just easier to do via CLI.