Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?
I think I just have too much going in my “lab” the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it’s more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it’s a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don’t have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don’t seem worth it.
I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.
Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it’s never ending…
I’m sick of everything moving to a docker image myself. I understand on a standard setup the isolation is nice, but I use Proxmox and would love to be able to actually use its isolation capabilities. The environment is already suited for the program. Just give me a standard installer for the love of tech.
unless you have zillion gigabytes of RAM, you really don’t want to spin up a VM for each thing you host. the separate OS-es have a huge memory overhead, with all the running services, cache memory, etc. the memory usage of most services can largely vary, so if you could just assign 200 MB RAM to each VM that would be moderate, but you can’t, because when it will need more RAM than that, it will crash, possibly leaving operations in half and leading to corruption. and to assign 2 GB RAM to every VM is waste.
I use proxmox too, but I only have a few VMs, mostly based on how critical a service is.
For VMs, I fully agree with you, but the best part about Proxmox is the ability to use containers, or CTs, which share system resources. So unlike a VM, if you specify a container has two gigs of RAM, that just means that it has two gigs of RAM that it can use, unlike the VM where it’s going to use that amount (and will crash if it can’t get that amount)
These CT’s do the equivalent of what docker does, which is share the system space with other services with isolation, While giving an easy to administrate and backup system, while keeping it able to be seperate by service.
For example, with a Proxmox CT, I can do snapshots of the container itself before I do any type of work, if where if I was using Docker on a primary machine, I would need to back up the Docker container completely. Additionally, having them as CTs mean that I can run straight on the container itself instead of having to edit a Docker file which by design is meant to be ephemeral. If I had to take troubleshooting bare bones versus troubleshooting a Docker container, I’m going to choose bare bones every step of the way.(You can even run an Alpine CT if you would rather keep the average Docker container setup)
Also for the over committing thing, be aware that your issue you’ve stated there will happen with a Docker setup as well. Docker doesn’t care about the amount of RAM the system is allotted. And when you over-allocate the system, RAM-wise, it will start killing containers potentially leaving them in the same state.
Anyway, long story short, Docker containers do basically the same thing that a Proxmox CT does. it’s just ephemeral instead of persistent, And designed to be plug-and-go, which I’ve found in the case of running a Proxmox-style setup, isn’t super handy due to the fact that a lot of times I would want to share resources such as having a dedicated database or caching system, Which is generally a pain in the butt to try to implement on Docker setups.
You can still use VMs and do containers in there. That’s what I do, makes separating different services very easy.
This is what I currently do with non-specialized services that require Docker. I have one container, which runs Docker Engine, and I throw everything on there, and then if I have a specialized container that needs Docker, I will still run its own CT. But then I use Docker Agent, So I can use one administration panel.
It’s just annoying because I would rather just remove Docker from the situation because when you’re running Proxmox, you’re essentially running a virtualized system in a virtualized system because you have Proxmox, which is the bare bones running a virtualized environment for the container, which is then running a virtualized environment for the Docker container.
NixOS for the win! Define your system and services, run a single command, get a reproducible, Proxmox-compatible VM out of it. Nixpkgs has basically every service you’d ever want to selfhost.
I thought that was the point of supporting OCI in the latest version so you can pull docker images and run them like an lxc container
If there’s a way of pulling a Docker container and running it directly as a CT on Proxmox, please fill me in. I’ve been using it for a year and a half to two years now, but I haven’t seen any ability to directly use a Docker container as an LXC.