Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff.
My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior.
> My only objection is that it's a 'full-fat' linux distro that needs to run off a real disk (unlike ESXi), however on every other level it's far superior.
Why not Alpine Linux? I use that in diskless mode https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#diskless_mode
My understanding is that alpine is a very light weight linux ditro and isn't a productised, easy to use hypervisor with full control via a gui.
It's a bit like me saying "I like music editing using xxx because it has a tonne of value added, makes it easy, but it requires an amount of hardware resource" and someone replying "pah, I just use a reel-to-reel, some sharp scissors and a roll of tape!" - unless I'm missing something, it's not really comparable.
edit: as tfigment pointed out along side my comment, I'm slightly annoyed that proxmox is a full-fat linux install for the hypervisor. The comparison I tried to make was with vmware ESXi which boots from an SD card or USB stick and is almost entirely held in memory after boot. ESXi has a whole number of other issues attached to it, but the fact I can throw a £10 usb stick in a server and use that as a boot drive, rather than "wasting" two of my SATA/SAS bays to a pair of real disks with the hypervisor installed on is nice.
I've been wanting to do something like that, but I was afraid that the combination of LXC + Docker would blow up due to networking or cgroups or something.
Are you running Docker and LXC containers side by side?
Any documentation on how you did it?
I had a previous home server built around docker, and found it fiddly to get right— most of the services I wanted to deploy didn't already have containers, and there was a lot of outer config stuff to play with, getting the containers to restart properly on reboot, getting DNS to resolve them, getting the right data directories set up as binds.
But that was also in 2016, so it's likely things are a lot better now, and conversely, it's not necessarily clear that a VM-based approach would be a lot better in some of these areas.
Proxmox is opinionated about how storage is allocated (I think lvm-thin is a bad idea), doesn't support docker, and has some quirks about getting the apt repos set up correctly if you're not a paying subscriber. It's fine if you want to use things in their opinionated way, but know that they're not doing any magic to make KVM work. KVM and LXC are the exact same as you'd get from debian out of the box.
PVE is basically Debian with a wonderful web-UI wrapped around KVM/QEMU. You don't really need it, but it sure makes life easy!
What else is there to take its place? oVirt can't do LXC.
You can also install pve on a debian system if you want the proxmox gui. If you want to do full disk encryption, that's the recommended approach, because proxmox's installer doesn't support it.
It makes sense to use Proxmox at home or in a business on a lot of planes. Ceph usage is not required, and it comes with excellent ZFS support. There are a lot of other great features which Proxmox facilitates.
But it is meant for using the machine mainly as an hypervisor, not as a desktop with the ability to ocasionally run a few virtual machines (in that case kvm+virt_manager or virtualbox are more desktop friendly).