Planning on setting up Proxmox and moving most services there. Some questions

I am currently running most of my stuff from an unraid box using spare parts I have. It seems like I am hitting my limit on it and just want to turn it into a NAS. Micro PCs/USFF are what I am planning on moving stuff to (probably a cluster of 2 for now but might expand later.). Just a few quick questions:

  1. Running arr services on a proxmox cluster to download to a device on the same network. I don’t think there would be any problems but wanted to see what changes need to be done.
  2. Which micro PCs are you running? I am leaving towards HP prodesk or Lenovo 7xx/9xx series around 200 each. I don’t really plan on getting more than 2-3 and don’t run too many things, but would want enough overhead if I switch stuff over to home assistant and windows and Linux VMs if needed.
  3. Any best practices you recommend when starting a Proxmox cluster? I’ve learned over time it’s best to set it up correctly than try to fix stuff when it’s running. I wish I could coach myself from 7 years ago now. Would of saved a lot of headaches lol.
Lem453,

I have a setup similar to what you want.

My nas is a low powered atom board that runs unraid.

My dockets run on a ryzen CPU with proxmox. I don’t have a cluster, just 1.

In proxmox I run a VM that runs a all my dockets.

I use portainer to run all my services as stacks. So the arr stack has all the arrs together in a docker compose file. The docker compose files are stored in gitea (one of the few things I still run on unraid) and Everytime I make a change to the git, I press one button on portainer and it pulls down the latest docker compose.

For storage, on proxmox I use zfs with ssds only. The only thing that needs HDDs is the media on my unraid.

When a docker needs to access the media it uses an NFS mount to the unraid server.

Everything else is on my zfs array on proxmox. I have auto zfs snapshots every hour. Borg backup also takes hourly incremental backups of the zfs array and sends it to the unraid server locally and borg base for off-site backup.

The whole setup works very well and it very stable.

The flexibility of using proxmox means that things that work better in a VM (HaOS) I can install as a VM. Everything else is docker.

t3chskel,

Consider checking out XCP-ng. I’ve been testing it for a few days and I’m really enjoying it. Seems less complicated and more flexible than Proxmox but admittedly I’m still learning and haven’t even tried multiple servers yet. I would suggest watching some YouTube videos first. Good luck!

possiblylinux127,

For your Proxmox cluster shoot for three devices. With three devices you can do high availability which is a bonus but not something I though to do when I built my setup.

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

And you don’t have quorum issues any time a system is down. (I regret making mine a cluster.)

nem,

You can set up a qdev on a pi or something.

possiblylinux127,

Can you? That would be really cool

nem,

Yeah, you can run it on anything and its great for even numbered clusters.

possiblylinux127,

Can you explain how?

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

I need to re-ip both of my proxmox hosts and ran into a wall due to quorum. This could get me over that hump.

That being said, it was a failed experiment to put them in a cluster. I don’t use any of the cluster functionality and would love to destroy the cluster config w/o having to rebuild the proxmox hosts.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

It’s 2024, avoid Proxmox and safe yourself a LOT of headaches down the line.

You most likely don’t need Proxmox and its pseudo-open-source bullshit. My suggestion is to simply with with Debian 12 + LXD/LXC, it runs VMs and containers very well. Proxmox ships with an old kernel that is so mangled and twisted that they shouldn’t even be calling it a Linux kernel. Also their management daemons and other internal shenanigans will delay your boot and crash your systems under certain circumstances.

What I would suggest you to use use instead is LXD/Incus.

LXD/Incus provides a management and automation layer that really makes things work smoothly - essentially what Proxmox does but properly done. With Incus you can create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

Another big advantage is the fact that it provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

I draw your attention to containers (not docker), LXC containers because for most people full virtualization isn’t even required. In a small homelab if you can have containers that behave like full operating systems (minus the kernel) including persistence, VMs might not be required. Either way LXD/Incus will allow for both and you can easily mix and match and use what you require for each use case.

For eg. I virtualize the official HomeAssistant image with LXD because we all know how hard is to get that thing running, however my NAS / Samba shares are just a LXD Debian 12 container with Samba4, Nginx and FileBrowser. Sames goes for torrent client that has its own container. Some other service I’ve exposed to the internet also runs a full VM for isolation.

Like Proxmox, LXD/Incus isn’t about replacing existing virtualization techniques such as QEMU, KVM and libvirt, it is about augmenting them so they become easier to manage at scale and overall more efficient. I can guarantee you that most people running Proxmox today it today will eventually move to Incus and never look back. It woks way better, true open-source, no bugs, no BS licenses and way less overhead.

Yes, there’s a WebUI for LXD as well!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9caa6ea8-17b1-48f6-a8c2-ff3f606f3482.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a5a110b2-ed6f-431f-a767-0a21fb337a6b.png

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

How well does it handle backups, and are they deduplicated incremental ones like proxmox backup server makes?

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I do regular snapshots of my containers live and sometimes restore them, no issues there. De-duplication and incremental features are (mostly) provided by the storage backend, if you use BTRFS or ZFS for your storage pool every container will be a volume that you can snapshot, rollback, export at any time. LXD also provides tools to make those operations: documentation.ubuntu.com/lxd/…/instances_backup/

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That makes sense, but no remote backups over the network? Local snapshots I don’t really count as backups.

lazynooblet,
@lazynooblet@lazysoci.al avatar

Can someone explain the benefits of LXD without the opinionated crap?

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

create clusters, download, manage and create OS images, run backups and restores, bootstrap things with cloud-init, move containers and VMs between servers (even live sometimes).

provides a unified experience to deal with both containers and VMs, no need to learn two different tools / APIs as the same commands and options will be used to manage both. Even profiles defining storage, network resources and other policies can be shared and applied across both containers and VMs.

What else do you need.

possiblylinux127, (edited )

Your comment is wrong in a few ways and suggests using a LXC which is way slower than docker or podman and lacks the easy setup.

Proxmox is good because it makes it easy to create VMs and setup least access. It also has as new of kernel as stable Debian so no, its not terribly out of date.

If you want to suggest that someone install Debian + Docker compose that would make more sense. This isn’t a good setup for more advanced setups and it doesn’t allow for a not of flexibility.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

This was a discussion about management solutions such as Proxmox and LXD and NOT about containerization technologies like Docker or LXC. Also Proxmox uses the Proxmox VE Kernel that is derived from Ubuntu.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. I’m not even sure you know the difference between LXD and LXC…

node815,

Since you didn’t include a link to the source for your recommendation:

github.com/canonical/lxd

I’ve been on Proxmox for 6 or so months with very few issues and have found it to work well in my instance, I do appreciate seeing another alternative and learning about it too! I very specifically like Proxmox as it gives me an actual IP on my router’s subnet for my machines such as Home Assistant. So instead of the 192.168.122.1 it rolls a nice 192.168.1.X/24 IP which fits my range which makes it easier for me to direct my outside traffic to it. Does this also do this? Based on your screenshots, maybe not, IDK.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

it gives me an actual IP on my router’s subnet for my machines

Yes you configure LXD/Incus’ networking to use a bridge and it will simply delegate the task to your router instead of proving IPs itself. One of my nodes actually runs the two setups at the same time, I’ve a bunch of containers on an internal range and then my Home Assistant VM getting an IP from my router.

jgkawell,
@jgkawell@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks for the link! I’ve been running Proxmox for years now without any of the issues like the previous commenter mentioned. Not that they don’t exist, just that I haven’t hit them. I really like Proxmox but love hearing about alternatives. One day I might get bored and want to set things up new with a different stack and anything that’s more free/open is better in my book.

atzanteol,

Use ZFS when prompted - it opens up some features and is a bitch to change later. I don’t understand why it’s not the default.

possiblylinux127, (edited )

I personally use both Btrfs and ZFS. For the main install I went with btrfs raid 1 as it is simpler and doesn’t have as much overhead.

I was a little worried about stability but I’ve had no issues and was able to swap a dead ssd without issue. It been going for almost 2 years now.

AlphaAutist,

From what I read disk wear out on consumer drives is a concern when using ZFS for boot drives with proxmox. I don’t know if the issues are exaggerated, but to be safe I ended up picking up some used enterprise SSDs off eBay for that reason.

atzanteol,

This seems to be a “widely believed fact” but I haven’t seen any real data to back it up.

DeltaTangoLima, (edited )
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

I have two Proxmox hosts and two NASes. All are connected at 1Gbps.

The Proxmox hosts maintain the real network mounts - nfs in my case - for the NAS shares. Inside each CT that requires them, these are mapped to mount points with identical paths in each, eg. /storage/nas1 and /storage/nas2.

All my *arr (and downloader) CTs are configured to use the exact same paths.

It’s seamless. nzbget or deluge download to the same parent folders that my *arr CTs work with, which means atomic renames/moves are pretty much instant. The only real network traffic is from the download CTs to the NASes.

Edit: my downloader CTs download directly to the NAS paths - no intermediate disk at all.

eerongal,
@eerongal@ttrpg.network avatar

Running arr services on a proxmox cluster to download to a device on the same network. I don’t think there would be any problems but wanted to see what changes need to be done.

I’m essentially doing this with my set up. I have a box running proxmox and a separate networked nas device. There aren’t really any changes, per se, other than pointing the *arr installs at the correct mounts. One thing to make note of, i would make sure that your download, processing, and final locations are all within the same mount point, so that you can take advantage of atomic moves.

archomrade,

I second this. It took me a really long time how to properly mount network storage on proxmox VM’s/LXC’s, so just be prepared and determine the configuration ahead of time. Unprivilaged LXC’s have differen’t root user mappings, and you can’t mount an SMB directly into a container (someone correct me if i’m wrong here), so if you go that route you will need to fuss a bit with user maps.

I personally have a VM running with docker for the arr suite and a separate LXC’s for my sambashare and streaming services. It’s easy to coordinate mount points with the compose.yml files, but still tricky getting the network storage mounted for read/write within the docker containers and LXC’s.

Cooljimy84,
@Cooljimy84@lemmy.world avatar

With arr services try to limit network throughput and disk throughput on them, as if either are maxed out for too long (like moving big linux iso files) it can cause weird timeouts and failures

Edgarallenpwn,
@Edgarallenpwn@midwest.social avatar

I believe I would be fine on the network part, I am just guessing writing them to an SSD cache drive on my NAS would be fine? Im currently writing to the SSD and have a move script run twice a day to the HDDs

Cooljimy84,
@Cooljimy84@lemmy.world avatar

Should be fine, I’m writing to spinning rust, so if I was playing back a movie it could cause a few “dad the tv is buffering again” problems

phanto,

Do two NICs. I have a bigger setup, and it’s all running on one LAN, and it is starting to run into problems. Changing to a two network setup from the outset probably would have saved me a lot of grief.

Edgarallenpwn,
@Edgarallenpwn@midwest.social avatar

So dual NIC on each device and set up another lan on my router? Sorry it seems like a dumb question but just want to make sure.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

Why would you need two nics unless you’re planning on having a proxmox Vm being your router?

FiduciaryOne,

I think two NICs is required to do VLANing properly? Not 100% sure.

DeltaTangoLima, (edited )
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

Nope - Proxmox lets you create VLAN trunks, just like a physical switch.

Edit: here’s one of my Proxmox server network configs.

FiduciaryOne,

Huh, cool, thank you! I’m going to have to look into that. I’d love for some of my containers and VMs to be on a different VLAN from others. I appreciate the correction. 😊

DeltaTangoLima,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

No worries mate. Sing out if you get stuck - happy to provide more details about my setup if you think it’ll help.

atzanteol,

I haven’t done it - but I believe Proxmox allows for creating a “backplane” network which the servers can use to talk directly to each other. This would be used for ceph and server migrations so that the large amount of network traffic doesn’t interfere with other traffic being used by the VMs and the rest of your network.

You’d just need a second NIC and a switch to create the second network, then staticly assign IPs. This network wouldn’t route anywhere else.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble,

In proxmox there’s no need to assign it to a physical NIC. If you want a virtual network that goes as frast as possible you’d create a bridge or whatever and assign it to nothing. If you assign it to a NIC then since it wants to use SR-IOV it would only go as fast as the NIC can go.

DeltaTangoLima,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

This is exactly my setup on one of my Proxmox servers - a second NIC connected as my WAN adapter to my fibre internet. OPNsense firewall/router uses it.

possiblylinux127,

Can you explain what benefit that would bring?

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