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Home Virtualization Options
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in Help
I'm rebuilding my home lab. I'm looking at virtualization options:
ESXi was lovely until I realized I couldn't clone a VM. I realize there are manual workarounds but seriously.
XCP-ng panics in the installer - just a long stream of wild kernel errors. Not sure what the issue is, since every other OS I've booted on this rather generic x86-64 system has worked fine.
So...I guess it's on to Proxmox. Any other suggestions?
Comments
Proxmox or I also like phpvirtualbox for a headless server.
Hmm.. open nebula? Never worked with, but I heard is awsome. You can give a try.
I've had the best experience/performance with VMWare but I don't use it much.
Usin unRAID 5 days. So far insanely good experience. Docker and KVM supported. More than enough for home usage. Recommended.
Oh yes, unraid is another option.
Unraid is very very good for home usage and has a vibrant community backing it for such.
There are also NAS-focused ones like TrueNAS Core/SCALE that are designed for home usage.
Otherwise, yeah, try Proxmox.
Thought about bhyve - FreeBSD?
I was also gonna mention TrueNAS. I'm building home NAS, and am willing to try out SCALE. Looks promising so far.
I have a lot of OpenBSD experience, but not much FreeBSD experience. Was actually thinking to spin up a couple freeBSD VMs to experiment with it. But I don’t really understand the platform enough to trust myself adminning it as a hypervisor.
Of course, now that I think about it, I could say the same thing about VMware, proxmox, etc :-)
XCP is quirky, I also switched to Proxmox because of larger user base and better hardware support, worst case scenario I install debian and go from there, so far didn't find any antiquated machine I still use which doesnt support it.
Plain libvirtd on Debian (or any other distro with good defaults like apparmor)
Virt-manager if you need a GUI
Only do ESXi if you have hardware RAID. Otherwise, go UnRAID.
For ESXi cloning, you do that from the command line via SSH or you use VMWare free migration app Converter Standalone to clone VM's or turn bare metal into a VM. The GUI option is better for progress and settings tweaking, especially when doing a few.
Are you objecting to the lack of two click cloning (e.g.snapshots) in the GUI or that manual cloning is too much effort/hassle? It's really, really not done that often or else it's just automated...
If you were cloning often, you'd just use a script and PowerCLI.
I think most people with decent servers have vcenter and that has cloning, AFAIK.
Hyper-V, Because it's easy to use.
Oracle VirtualBox has some nice features too, like snapshots which I use
If you truly want a virtualization-first approach, do SmartOS. Boot via USB or PXE, all your local disks are used for storage. Just need a lightweight container? Run an LX zone. Need a real Linux kernel? Choose bhyve or KVM as your poison.
There are integrations for SmartOS as well.
Terraform: github/CoolpeopleNetworks/terraform-provider-smartos
Ansible: also modules available as well
Just installed Proxmox on a Pi4 at home and clustered it with other external Proxmox servers. Very impressive.
Use Zerotier and routing so all Proxmox VMs can access each other if their firewalls permit.
Running NodeRed at home migrating that to the Proxmox cluster so I have so much more flexibility.
Also got a standalone external VM for Voip and integrating this into the network. Even got NAT working properly so I can use a single public IP and feed ports (voip) directly to Proxmox VM.
Go Proxmox....
Depends what you want from the tooling and how often you end up interacting with it.
I'm a little old-school and do things manually, KVM mainly (created & poked via virt-manager or from the command line) with a couple of bits in LXC containers¹ where I don't want to allocate dedicated RAM to a simple task but also don't want to run it directly on the bare host OS.
[1] privileged mainly as I'm tool lazy to change that, and they are internal-only parts that are not really a security concern (to get to them you need to compromise something else more significant first)
Thanks - that's desktop and slower as opposed to booting the hypervisor directly. I do love (and use) VBox on my laptop/desktop.
It's not difficult to do but...seriously, who do I have to hunt down scripts for a basic feature? The answer is VMware limiting their free product to upsell vSphere. That's fine for them but not convenient for me.
Yes, definitely, if I was doing this as a business, that's a great way to go, but I'm not spending thousands on a hypervisor for home.
For me the hypervisor is completely uninteresting and not something I want to spend a lot of time on, so I do prefer something relatively simple from an interface perspective.
It's not expensive but I can't see it gives me anything that a free product doesn't.
I fired up ProxMox and it seems to do everything I want. I installed, setup bonded NICs, created some templates, etc., all very intuitively. The GUI looks 1990s but it seems to be working very well. Going to continue to play.
All very fair, Promox seems like it would suit you well in that case. Hope you enjoy.
Alpine Linux with kvm tools (libvirtd etc) and virt-manager
I just wanted to say thank you for creating this thread - it's introduced a few new tools to me