Homelab - Virtualisation

I’ve run a server at home from since I can remember Linux / Windows and now ESXi. I’ve followed the homelab and home server threads. I am going to do an ESXi upgrade 6.5 → 6.7, but my Microserver is now out of official support and it got me thinking. Is now the time to change virtualisation technologies. I have been running ESX for about 10 years, I used to manage ESX clusters, etc so it made sense. I am now in management so further away from the tech. I am wondering if it is time to abandon ESXi and go proxmox (which I run on my personal dedis).

What virtualisation tech do you run at home and why? :slight_smile:

I only have a couple servers at home among other misc h/w (rasp pi’s, etc.) and I started out using ESXi. Eventually I dumped it in favor of just running Ubuntu server on both of the machines. Some apps are virtualized using Docker, but besides that not really any other visualization going on.

But… if I were to pick up more hardware to throw into the homelab, I’d likely go with Proxmox. Since using ESXi, I’ve used Proxmox quite a bit on some rented dedis and really like it/have gotten comfortable with it. Couple other reasons I like it is that the base OS is Debian (which is my goto OS besides Ubuntu) and it’s pretty simple to use for the most part. So if it were me, I’d choose Proxmox over ESXi were I in need of virtualization.

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I had the same type of question and was between Virtualizor and Proxmox. The folks here convinced me to go Proxmox and it’s been amazing. LXC is really quick and we’ve picked up a Hetzner auction dedi to replace some of our cloud nodes. Clustering is great, I can see the homelab servers and the production stuff on the same panel, saving a few screens and monitors. Networking was a bit to set up, but that was mostly from Hetzner and their odd routing. (Thanks to Falzo for some hints and templates!) Next trick is to work on PCI passthrough to get some hardware in to a few KVM instances.

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We did it boys! :clap:

Proxmox. Debian-based host, fairly light, decent interface and lots of config options available via the panel. Also it’s free and regularly updated.

I haven’t found anything else as functional and feature rich for the price, and I haven’t had any issues that have sent me looking for a replacement.

At work we’ve got a couple big boxes that rarely get taken down because it’s a pain to pause and restart all the jobs running on them, and until recently when I decided to rebuild the box (around spectre/meltdown) we had something like 500 days of uptime with a machine that’s at like a constant ~15.0 load. (KernelCare supports the PVE kernel btw)

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Currently:
I have a 4 node proxmox and ceph cluster. Each server has about 32GBs of RAM, and varying CPUs. It’s a giant network of things, with projects in various states of doneness

  • Single Sign On
    • Active Directory (2 node, dynamic cluster)
  • Service Discover
    • Consule (3 node, static cluster)
  • load balancing
    • traefik for interal http(s) load balancin (3 node, static cluster)
    • traefik for external http(s) load balancing (3 node, static cluster)
  • Storage
    • Ceph
      • Block
      • File
      • Object
  • lots more
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Pics avail?

Possibly if I get around to it :stuck_out_tongue:

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