This has been done before but last I saw was in 2017…things have changed with ESXi, Citrix, and Proxmox etc…
I’d love to hear what people use for work and or prefer for home.
I’m getting comfortable with Proxmox, but getting ready to try Windows Server 2016 (is compatible with my Dell T320), VMware ESXi. I may add another drive for citrix. I’m just wondering what people like and why.
I will clarify… I guess for the purposes of running a few VM’s (IE Plex, Pi-hole or other useful home applications) or other great uses for a personal server.
A couple years ago, I spent a good deal of time pouring over DISA STIG for RHEL 7. Because of that time investment, I tend to stay in RHEL ecosystem. I have scripts for onboarding/securing it and am generally comfortable using it (CentOS at least).
Additionally, oVirt is the closest alternative to vSphere/ESXi that I’ve used. ESXi is arguably the best virtualization platform, but of course, it is proprietary and expensive. Deploying a cluster in oVirt is pretty easy, especially since they provide an appliance ISO. The network is kind of quirky, but not too bad.
It’s impressively stable (in my experience) and feature-rich, especially considering it’s basically qemu/kvm glued to a lot of other things with a bunch of python and ansible.
zfs on unraid (or proxmox) is cool, especially for a single host, but zfs + virt is a huge memory demand. I’d rather have zfs on dedicated storage hardware and provide block via iscsi or gluster.
Wow, Nice Interface. Does seem to make things easy. I have the same motherboard in my other server. I have two currently. One based on the X470D4U and then a Dell T320 (soon to be T420) I recently got.
This might solve the issue of using Proxmox on newer hardware, or being able to use it in the majorly changed Debian 12… or is it not compatable with that OS? I cant remember what changed, but I know all the workarounds and scripts (Might be wrong terminology here) or was it the kernel that was changed. I cant remember. I’ve been reading ALOT.
If you can understand documentation, you’ll be fine. QEMU doesn’t need code, really, just configuration.
You might want libvirt as a supporting tool for QEMU.
Yeah, truenas is not a good tool for virtualization. Bhyve integration just isn’t there yet.
I choose to not support VMWare due to their violation of GPL re: Linux kernel. If you want to use it, it’s a powerful tool, but I’m not in favor of it.
I agree there. I am considering using it as a central storage manager. It is a bit easier to glance at the health of my pool than typing zpool status all the time. However I am sure there are many options for monitoring a zpool thats natively on Proxmox or Debian. I haven’t even been able to set up email alerts the way I want yet. Or at all really…
I know there is history there. I will say after exploring VMware, it is nice, has a lot of integration with my Dell system, but my hangup is to really use it I will have to pay annually for it. It feels like windows (which I’m attempting to move away from almost entirely-as I work out kinks for gaming) I don’t think I’m up for that. I can afford it, but why when there are so many opensource options that work great?
Thats my thinking at least.
I’m rethinking my setup now. Kind of wishing I had invested in a Dell Power Vault or similar for central storage.