Hello everyone,
I am about to renovate my selfhosting setup (software wise). And then thought about how I could help my favourite lemmy community become more active. Since I am still learning many things and am far away from being a sysadmin I don’t (just) want tell my point of view but thought about a series of posts:
Your favourite piece of selfhosting
I thought about asking everyone of you for your favourite piece of software for a specific use case. But we have to start at the bottom:
Operating systems and/or type 1 hypervisors
You don’t have to be an expert or a professional. You don’t even have to be using it. Tell us about your thoughts about one piece of software. Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn’t? Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps? Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?
I am eager to hear about your thoughts and stories in the comments!
And please also give me feedback to this idea in general.
Stage 1: Ubuntu server
Stage 2: Ubuntu server + docker
Stage 3: Ansible/OpenTofu/Kubernetes
Stage 4: Proxmox
Kubernetes is overkill for most things not just self hosting. If you need to learn it great otherwise don’t waste your time on it. Extremely complicated given what it provides.
fr, unless you’re horizontally scaling something or managing hundreds of services what’s the point
I agree with this thread, but to answer your question I think the point is to tinker with it j “just because”. We’re all in this for fun, not profit.
oops straight to stage 4.
but wait stage 3 looks daunting
Don’t get me wrong, I use libvrt where it makes sense but why would anyone go to proxmox from a full iac setup?
I do 2 at home, and 3 at work, coming from 4 at both and haven’t looked back.
Because it is much simpler to provision a VM
Maybe for the initial setup, but nothing is more repeatable than automation. The more manual steps you have to build your infra, the harder it is to recover/rebuild/update later
You automate the VM deployments.
if you’re automating the creation and deployment of vms, and the downstream operating systems, and not doing some sort of HA/failover meme setup… proxmox makes things way more complicated than raw libvirt/qemu/kvm.
Can you please elaborate on this? I am currently using MicroOS and think about NixOS because of quick setup. But also about Proxmox and NixOS on top. Where would libvirt fit in in this scenario?
If you ran a raw Ubuntu/fedora/whatever, you can use qemu/libvrt to run small virtual machines as required. You start and stop them with virsh, define them with simple xml files, and can easily automate the creation/destruction of them if desired.