tl;dr: Proxmox or bare metal? Containers yes/no? What is your use case?
I used a Dell R710 when I first started self-hosting, it ran ESXi with one VM for each service I wanted. Restarting the server required me to first shutdown each VM in order and then the whole host. When setting up a new service to host I had to create a new VM (allocate RAM, disk etc), install the OS (I ran Debian) and then follow instructions for how to setup the service. This mostly was not a problem but one software I never managed to get working was Apache Guacamole.
Nowadays I have a Dell Optiplex I salvaged for parts, got a new case and all my HDDs from my R710. Because it has much less RAM and an old Intel i5 (6th or 7th generation), I decided to get into Docker. With Docker containers you write your compose file and it will just work. No more need to dig through documentation for which version of a dependency to use, how to handle if two services on the same host need different versions (this was part of the reason for one VM/service). With Docker, I can try out a software in seconds and have it configured to my liking in minutes.
Today I have NixOS (bare metal) and it comes with Podman which uses systemd. Hence restarting my OS (albeit not that often, almost never unless I mess up my config) is a no-brainer because Podman via systemd will manage everything. Adding, stopping or removing containers in general is easy. I have a script running as a service which will stop a container, create a BTRFS subvolume snapshot, start the service again and start borg backup to backup from the snapshot.
For me using Proxmox would just an extra layer of complexity I don't need. I only have one server and I am the only user.
Questions:
- Do you use Proxmox instead of a bare metal installation?
- Do you use containers or do you install manually?
- What is you use case that requires your setup the way it is?
I used to be bare metal Debian, but I moved to ProxMox for a few reasons.
It works, it’s easy, and the simplicity has saved my butt a few times. I don’t think I’ll be switching, and I’d recommend it to anyone running a homelab. I still use docker to manage most of my services inside a VM.
I secon running docker apps on a Proxmox VM. It has saved my homlab admin time significantly.
Why not put your wiki notes on your admin machine (whatever machine you use to manage the proxmox server)?
I could, but it’s more convenient for me to have it served up by an LXC container on the server. I’m usually interacting with things on a laptop or a phone, so it’s just easy being able to have a tab open with my wiki served through Tailscale, and ProxMox makes sure it stays backed up to an external drive and the cloud so I don’t lose anything.
The few times I’ve had a critical error with ProxMox, it’s been super simple to do a fresh install and just restore my daily backup.
There are many ways it could be done, but this way has been mine, and it’s worked for me.