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Comment by gboone | Hacker News Reader

Can't say enough about how I appreciate Proxmox. I had tried Xenserver but it didn't play well with my setup. Proxmox is robust from GUI and CLI. I run two small businesses from my home and the setup allows me to efficiently host pFsense, a mail server, multiple web and DB servers.

But even better for me, the ease and ability to pass through a GPU and run Windows in a VM while using modifiable resources makes it so flexible.

I've been a customer for over two years and they provide support with a super reasonable yearly subscription of just $99. The forum is active and the updates are recent and up to speed.

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The Xenserver fork is really great. https://xcp-ng.org/ very active community and timely updates without all the licensing restrictions.

do you know if you can pass through raw disks as well? I.e. i see that it supports ZFS could i attach that pool within a vm and not directly to proxmox?

I have done PCI passthroughs and USB passthroughs. One of my PCI passthroughs is a MegaRaid card. Not sure how you are physically connecting the pool, but if the pool is running on dedicated hardware, there's a good chance you could passthrough the hardware...very good if PCI or USB based.

Proxmox's hosts controller does not require being on ZFS itself...you can have multiple drives and filesystems. If it were available to Proxmox and not passed through, it could be allocated only to a particular VM. In case that was your only end goal..

> Proxmox is robust from GUI and CLI.

I'm looking through the CLI docs now and I can't even figure out how to launch a VM. At face value, it doesn't look like a good CLI (well actually they list a bunch of CLI tools for VM management). Am I just looking in the wrong place?

I also want the ability to run setup commands (think AWS user-data) at first boot. The docs indicate user-data support though cloud-init, but I see forum discussions that indicate that you can only set up basic things like IP addresses, SSH keys, etc. Is there a programmatic way to inject bash commands at first boot?

You might want to consider ganeti. It works great from the command-line. There is a GUI for it as a separate project, but I've never used it. I've been running ganeti in dev/stg for 6-7 years and production for around 4, and it's been extremely solid.

As far as running bash commands at first boot, in ganeti I have customized their "create" script to include a bash script that installs some packages, clones our Ansible setup, and then runs Ansible to set the machine up. We respin our entire staging cluster every other day (even machines one day, odd the next).

http://www.ganeti.org/

For documentation: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/

The "qm" page shows:

  qm start <vmid> [OPTIONS]
  Start virtual machine.

Please read the docs properly mate.

pct - controls containers

qm - controls vms

What do you mean by "using modifiable resources"?

Yes, unclear sorry. I meant modifying the availability of resources, and simply praising the general value of VMs.

But also in the cases when the VMs are never running at the same time. Sometimes the "shop" closes and gaming starts...

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