Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE | Hacker News Reader

Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

tteck.github.io

175 pointsrcarmo106 comments

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The actual scripts: https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox

After poking at a couple of these, they seem like they're 50% shiny packaging and 50% one-liner bash commands.

The recipe for a very useful devops tool :)

Having standardized components like these is pretty valuable and reusable.

One could definitely write them on their own.

It’s also another way to discover other packages in these categories.

Some of the LXC container settings can be a little specific and these scripts manage those we’ll most of the time with a standard install, or an advanced one is available too.

Most of homelabbing is this. it's an outlet to play. unixporn, neofetch, pretty dashboards to link to all of your content pirating tools, etc.

This this a negative or a positive?

And more broadly, a lot of software could be summarised as a pretty packaging of a basic tool.

It really depends on your perspective and what you want out of a homelab. If you want to tinker with servers as a hobby it's a huge plus.

If you want things to Just Work, this is probably not for you

I've been a "Just Work" person for a long time, but over the last couple years I've shifted to DIYing more instead of buying turn-key products. I replaced my off-the-shelf NAS with a custom TrueNAS box, and swapped my router+firewall+switch+WiFi all-in-one with a low-energy device running pfSense and a dedicated WiFi AP.

I have been pleasantly surprised to find that, after the initial research & setup, things still "just work!" In some cases, more reliably (and way more quietly!) than before.

I've had the same experience in reverse. I'm a tinkerer and I always have been. I bought a server expecting to tinker with it all the time. What fun!

But no, after the first couple hours of tinkering it Just Works.

This past week I settled in for a good solid weekend of getting a gitlab server stood up. I was looking forward to it! Imagine my disappointment when it was a single command that took half an hour to run.

Oh well, I guess it just means more time for my other hobbies.

Bro we spend all day looking at screens. Literally the definition of shiny packages

I think the balance is closer to 80% shiny, 20% working code.

There's definitely some cool stuff here (disabling the nag screen, thank you!) but I really dislike the way it's presented.

I don't like the curl|bash very much, but mostly I think this would be far more interesting as a collection of one-liners to accomplish each task vs the current form of a curl|bash with dialogs and prompts. I think that's better for security and better for learning you should know what commands you're executing!

Being disabled scripts like these really help me, I can’t sit behind a computer as much as I could before, but it’s still my main hobby.

I do a quick look over of the source to make sure it’s ok. It saves me so much time and pain.

I really wish proxmox had sort of first-class docker/podman integration.

With docker it seems a Dockerfile is a self-contained recipe. You build it, then you run the container.

with proxmox, you sort of have to be a sysadmin. The proxmox UI helps you define the characteristics of the container, but then you have to put everything inside the container yourself without help or reproducibility.

Proxmox is awesome. I use it for my router and a bunch of servers. [1] it is so nice to be able to take a snapshot, update opnsense and go back if something fails.

It's working so well I now have too many vms and need to get a bigger disk.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

Wow that is a whole bunch of curling/execing bash scripts that curl/exec other bash scripts.

Yeah, all done as blind execution of remote code. Bleh.

yes, but come on: you download it and quickly check yourself

Not really that simple. All the scripts there curl|bash more scripts. If you want to audit the contents you’ll have to follow quite a few.

yes, I had a better look at not trivial ones, and you are all correct

Assuming that the script you download is the same as the script that curl|bash downloads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231128113854/https://www.idont...

A neat attack, but probably unrealistic in the context of those downloads being on github.

Its not just one script that you're curling and execing. That scripts curls and execs some other scripts. And those others. You're pretty much auditing a whole codebase at that point, for better or worse.

Serious question: What is the advantage of Proxmox for power linux users that can run a debian or ubuntu server box + KVM ?

I'm always reading stuff about people using proxmox but don't really understand its 'edge'

Me either, although I am using it for my home. It does allow configuring VMs, containers, logical volumes, and such. I think you can have multiple proxmox in a cluster. I might not have reached the point where I am doing enough with it to understand the benefit.

For me who uses it as a NAS/VM platform, it’s basically Debian with some virtualization relevant packages and an opt in kernel that are more reasonably up to date, with solid ZFS support out of the box so I don't care about the "update kernel, reboot, oops version mismatch I need to revert" nonsense.

While things like TrueNAS exist with ZFS support, in the past iX systems has made some overeager patches to ZFS, to bring in new features that weren't appropriate to include yet IMO. I hate to dig up old news, but that's why I've avoided them so far.

Basically I've got Proxmox "figured out", which lets me fuck around with the things I want, rather than the things I don’t want. This reduces my very subjective mental overhead.

All the high availability stuff is wasted on me though, and I just disable the related services.

Note to new users experimenting with proxmox The most common "gotcha" with proxmox, is that it does NOT automatically adjust network stuff after install. If you switch out a network card or change what physical port it's connected with, you will lose network access, and need to manually edit `/etc/network/interfaces` to make sure your using a correct port ID and/or assigned IP are valid.

  iface vmbr0 inet static
    ...
    bridge-ports <The port ID, like "enp130s0f0">
    ...

> While things like TrueNAS exist with ZFS support, in the past iX systems has made some overeager patches to ZFS, to bring in new features that weren't appropriate to include yet IMO. I hate to dig up old news, but that's why I've avoided them so far.

I've also not enjoyed reading their forums at all, while information about Proxmox tends to be actually helpful rather than berating people over their hardware choice or spreading misinformation about ZFS.

UI, zfs out of the box, has an api.

Also clustering, VM/LXC migration between nodes, backups, access control, software-defined firewall...

It's a product instead of a box of parts. My brain only has so much cognitive power. If I'm spinning up a VM, I'm trying to accomplish some other work.

I was in a similar boat and finally got around to trying out Proxmox in the last year or so. I just wanted share my own experience here, since it's a bit different than the "standard" uses I've seen.

I had been running a k3s cluster (k8s flavor) on some Raspberry Pis, but decided I needed some non-ARM nodes, and "invested" in a few low power "1L" AMD64 PCs (6-8 core + hyper-threading). I was initially going to just install Ubuntu and base my setup off my existing Ansible automation to make things less inefficient. But I figured I'd play around with Proxmox first and see if there was any benefit to using that as a base layer since I'd heard a lot about it.

I'm so glad I did. I ended up learning quite a bit in the process. Some quick highlights about using Proxmox for VMs in general:

* Proxmox supports creating a "cluster", so you can login though one machine to administer them all. You can conveniently "move" VMs between machines pretty seamlessly.

* If you install the para-virtualization drivers for e.g. Windows or Ubuntu VMs, you can do pretty fast remote KVM. E.g. I could run Youtube on a Windows VM in my basement over "Spice" and it almost looks like it's running locally. (Not that it's a use case I care about, mostly just shows the fact it's performant.)

In terms of actually getting around to deploying k3s on top of the infra:

* I ended up learning HPC-Packer, and HPC-Terraform, which integrated nicely with my existing Ansible experience.

* Packer turns an Ubuntu ISO + my "base" Ansible setup playbooks into a pre-baked machine template directly in Proxmox. (My local machine's Packer binary just orchestrates the process.)

* Terraform deploys the machine template into the Proxmox cluster. Basically a config file of machine names + IPs + mac adresses, and a few other params and initial setup.

* Ansible then installs any final dependencies (anything not in the base template), setups up the first k3s master, grabs the join token, and adds in 2 more master nodes for a proper `etcd` backend.

* Ansible then installs my base Kubernetes services (cert-manager, Rancher, Longhron storage, etc) via running helm commands on one of the nodes.

* This is where I'm at now; the next step is for me to deploy my existing Flux.cd-automated "Gitops" apps (built for ARM64+AMD64 via Gitlab runner, also in Proxmox). These _had_ been running on my now-quite-crusty-seeming Pi cluster.

I can run a single command to delete all the VMs, and rebuild + setup everything (full HA cluster + apps deployed and running) from scratch in ~6 minutes without any manual input required from me, just a few secrets/params in a config file.

This has made exploring the horizon of possibilities _so much easier_ without getting locked in; I can try to weird Longhorn storage configs, or try out k8s monitoring stacks without worrying about needing to "back out" my changes if I picked bad settings. (Just blow it up and try again!) I can change how VLANs are configured in early steps, or try adding a library to the base Ubuntu install cluster-wide super easily, etc.

I am primarily a software-engineer, so it has been really nice to delve into the operational side of things, and get a proper reproducible setup. It really has transformed how I think about the cluster in that it's no longer a "thing to carefully maintain", but instead a great sandbox to explore AND deploy my own k8s applications on top of without playing cloud bills.

My Proxmox journey in the past few months definitely turned into more than a rabbit hole than I'd expected.

Could I please ask you to share some of your Terraform files? I'm looking to build a similar setup on my Proxmox cluster, and it would really help to have a template to go from!

This is a great answer, thank you! It really makes sense to build a box with Proxmox at home with this view. Nice!

Running it at home on a few 1L thin clients is pretty grand. Quiet, performant, and everything you learn scales to enterprise well.

it makes hard stuff simple.

yeah you can write weird shell script and re-implement hot vm migration (moving a physical machine from one physical host to another without shutting it down) but what's the point, really? you might as well use proxmox.

if you ever actually need to see how it's done you could just see what's proxmox doing under the hood (it's open source after all)

Like most useful things, it provides abstraction, simplicity, and organization.

It has a webui with a bunch of features.

If you don't like or want those things, that's fine. This question feels like a "no true power user would...".

It's a sandbox that lets you play without stepping in the mud or throwing rocks. See my other post in this thread for what happens when you try to do it the hard way.

With proxmox, I click the plus sign, pick an iso image, cpu/mem, and i'm good to go and I have a remote console viewer and tons of other neat mgmt stuff.

In the same amount of time, if I were diving in to DIYing it, I'd probably be about 5 minutes into reading the arch linux wiki page for KVM/qemu.

Easier, and it's debian, so, stays easy, very low overhead.

Like any distro, it has some quirks, but, those are worth dealing with because the day to day is almost always frictionless.

I don't see anything on cloud-init (did I miss some link?) while it works perfectly in Proxmox, see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cloud-Init_Support

Although its supported, its not well documented enough to be a good way to learn about cloud-init in my experience. I tried configuring a K3's cluster across three proxmox nodes via cloud-init to get some exposure to it and eventually gave up and just configured them manually

I had the same issue at the beginning, and unfortunately stopped on it for over a year: then I went back and got it and now I cannot think of provisioning a VM by hand anymore

Have a look at this script for example https://github.com/francescor/swarm/blob/main/create_swarm_v... which is the "proxmox" side of cloud-init, that then load an ordinary cloud-init https://github.com/francescor/swarm/blob/main/cloud-init/clo...

lol (looking at cloud init for ubuntu 22...)

  ...
  # remove snapd trash
  - snap remove lxd
  - snap remove core20
  - snap remove snapd
  - systemctl stop snapd.service
  - systemctl stop snapd.socket
  - systemctl stop snapd.seeded.service
  - systemctl disable snapd.service
  - systemctl disable snapd.socket
  - systemctl disable snapd.seeded.service
  - systemctl stop snapd.service
  - systemctl stop snapd.socket
  - systemctl stop snapd.seeded.service
  - rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/
  - apt autoremove --purge snapd -y
  - rm -rf /root/snap
  # remove apport trash
  ...

Using cloudinit in proxmox is godsend. I can spin up a fresh linux vm and login with my ssh key (and ansible) in less than a minute.

exactly!

I try to do everything without Ansible: cloud-init is pretty powerful, too, but I am reaching the 64k limit, so sooner then later will go "back" to Ansible.

If you're already familiar with Ansible, what about doing some stuff with cloud-init and then having cloud-init trigger a local ansible run? Then you don't have to worry about running into the limit.

It works, but anytime you have custom networking or more complex cloud-init configs, you'll have to go into "snippets" territory or referring to files in a local filesystem of the host. They don't have API support for making snippets the last time I checked. Where I ran into this was when trying to set up hosts with Terraform on Proxmox VE (which works well itself too).

The best way to handle this (which is really terrible, honestly, but it works) is to make configdrive2 ISOs locally, and upload those using the API. That is, don't give Proxmox a cloud-init snippet, but rather a fully-built cloud-init ISO. This is basically bypassing/reimplementing Proxmox's cloud-init features yourself, which is terrible. But it works really well.

There's a pretty neat Proxmox API library written in Go that can do this all for you: https://github.com/luthermonson/go-proxmox

There's a Terraform plugin planned, as well. Not sure what the status on it is, currently.

I also am slowly working on my own Proxmox CLI, consuming the go-proxmox library: https://github.com/perchnet/gomox

But unfortunately I don't have much software engineering experience, so it's a very slow process... :)

If anyone is looking at proxmox, running these scripts from the host will speed up experimenting.

It’s great to have something up and running in minutes to only redo it slightly differently.

If you are considering two proxmox hosts ensure the second one added to the cluster is an empty proxmox host, and the proxmox cluster from the first box will assign unique id’s to all containers on any host.

Also, for homelabbing, there's a magic incantation that allows you to configure Proxmox away from the default High Availability cluster mode.

By default, the HA mode insists that all nodes are up or others won't come up, making this tweak (it may be contained in the OP scripts, I don't recall) allows you to retain many of the benefits of having Proxmox machines "connected", without requiring you treat them like a HA cluster.

In my case, I have a node I shutdown when it's not used, I use it for specific occasional tasks, and then I have nodes I want up all of the time.

With the non-HA tweaks, you can still do things like centrally manage, migrate VMs and containers between nodes etc, without the limitations of it wanting them all up and available all of the time.

Would this work for having proxmox modes across multiple datacenters? IIRC it was sensitive to latency

I don't really use the HA features of proxmox that often, mostly just for migrating vms across hosts. But I had been thinking of re-installing some of my remote servers with proxmox and hooking them up to the same cluster so that I could potentially shut off all of the servers in my basement and run everything from a remote location, then migrate the vms back later.

OP may know better, but in part it may depend on the ms latency between the sites?

I've not noticed anything latency-sensitivty, perhaps the Ceph feature? I'm not using that though.

There's also the issue of quorum of it's only a 2-node cluster, though I've personally not had any issues with it, despite repeatedly restarting the different nodes.

I see no reason why you couldn't do this to allow you to move your VMs from home to elsewhere and back again as you just mentioned.

ceph is latency sensitive, but that should only matter for the servers running ceph and not (as much) the clients using it.

I thought quorum feature of proxmox was also latency sensitive, but this is the only thing I found:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cluster_Manager#pvecm_cluster_n...

Maybe this doesn't matter if not using HA? I'll read more about it and maybe test it out

Yeah I've not had any issues. I have nodes they are offline for months when not in use, it doesn't seem to have any effect of you're not using HA.

Just my experience though, YMMV.

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc)

Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

You really should have different physical hardware for such different use-cases.

Why? I find having a single capable hypervisor hosting VMs far more reliable than a bunch of smaller machines.

Maybe running a firewall on dedicated hardware so the internet doesn't drop if you reboot the hypervisor.. but even then I just live with that and run pfSense in proxmox.

Excellent point! I do run my main PiHole in a VM, but I have a second PiHole running on an RPi just in case I'm rebooting the hypervisor. DNS is the only real dependency that can cause problems for me when the hypervisor reboots for updates. I'm just running Fedora on a somewhat recent Dell rack server.

Firewall is a great example of what not to run on a vm, at least for me! I consider gateways as appliances though, and I haven't run my own router on Linux since I first got Cable internet in 2002. I remember how awesome it was compared to the weak routers available at the time!

Now I just buy a UDM Pro and forget about it!

I have run proxmox for several years, rely on it for many bits of house and network infrastructure, and recommend proxmox overall. My desktop also runs proxmox with PCIe passthrough for my "actual" desktop (but this is a different proxmox server from the primary VM and container host for infrastructure).

That said, I wouldn't mix the two use cases either initially nor over the long-term. House/network infrastructure should be on a more stable host than the retro-game console connected to your TV (IMO).

In your case, I'd recommend buying another PC (even an ancient Haswell would be fine to start) and getting experience with vanilla proxmox usage there before jumping straight into trying to run infra and MAME/retro gaming on PCIe passthrough on the same singleton box.

I did this for a while where I ran multiple VMs, some of which had PCIE passthrough for some GPUs on both Windows and Linux. Luckily my motherboard separated out IOMMU groupings to make this work for me. While you _could_ do this, you may run into issues if your IOMMU groups aren't separated enough. The biggest issue I always had was drivers always causing issues with Windows. I eventually blew the entire instance away and just run Windows.

I'd recommend a separate device if you need any access to a GPU. But I do recommend Proxmox as a homelab. I still have it running on a separate 2012 Mac Mini.

Most server motherboards these days sorry iommu acs which keys you divide iommu groups logically.

From what I know you cannot pass the primary video card to a guest, so you'd need a second video card to pass-through to the guest.

But i'd be happy to be proven wrong.

You can, but it disconnects it from the host, so you'll be headless. Which may be fine for a lot of people if you are able to ssh in and manage it that way.

This is exactly how I have mine set up aye. Proxmox on hardware, Main PC as a VM - once I got to the point where Proxmox had its web interface (and ssh) up and running I had no real reason to have a monitor plugged into the hardware OS anyway. Passed the GPU and all USB ports to the PC guest from there.

At the time I had no idea how popular it was to run this setup, I thought I was being all weird and experimental. Was surprised how smoothly everything ran (and still runs, a year and change later!)

Bonus, I was able to just move the PC to another disk when the SSD it was on was getting a bit full. Moved PC's storage onto a spinny HDD to make room to shuffle some other stuff around, then moved it to another SSD. Didn't even need to reboot the PC VM, haha.

Proxmox backup server running on my NAS handles deduplicated backups for it and other VMs too which is great.

you can pass the primary video card to a lxc guest, I used [1] successfully to do that.

[1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...

I’m in the middle of this. Got a Bee Link miniPC. It came with windows, licensed oddly. I’m configuring it as a home server. Current plan is to migrate my Unraid install over from the vintage server it’s currently on. Most services are run in docker. We’ll see how performance is.

ProxMox is on my list to try out. So far I’m very happy with Unraid. It makes it easy to set up network shares, find and deploy containerized services, and handles VMs if you need them. I try to avoid the VM and focus on containers because it’s more flexible resource wise.

If the pc is beefy enough (win 11 pro runs smoothly) just go with the included hyper-v. Imho you don’t get any benefits installing proxmox on bare metal in this scenario. YMMV of course

In that case, simply running Linux + KVM or VirtualBox would better

My use-case is slightly different, but I use Proxmox for my home server and would recommend it. Especially if you're familiar with linux systems or want to learn about them which I've done through the years I've been using this setup.

My server was originally a single debian installation set up to host local services for things like git. That grew into hosting a site, vpn, then some multiplayer game servers. When I reached a point where too many things were installed on single machine, I looked at vm options. I've used VMWare/VSphere professionally, but settled on Proxmox for these main reasons: easy to set up and update, easy to build/copy vms, simple way to split physical resources, monitoring of each vm, and simple backup and restores. All without any weird licensing.

That server houses 4 vms right now. That might be a bit much for your mini pc but you could do a couple. The multiplayer servers are the main hog so I isolate resources for that. The windows machine is only for development which isn't your exact use case. I can say however that I've never had issue when I need it. Only thing I can't speak for is the need for graphics passthrough.

You want to use Hyper-v, you can use GPU-P(Gpu Partitoning) where hyper-v will pass through the GPU to the VM and share it, it's not some emulated adapter, it's genuinely the real GPU and runs natively and you can share it across multiple VM's and host. Linux has NOTHING that can compete with the feature.

But a Windows user, so I could be completely off base, but isn't GPU-P just VFIO under the hood? I don't know about Proxmox, but this is completely supported by OpenStack and KVM.

No, it uses the hypervisor to implement a scheduler for the GPU between the different vm's and gives them access to it. VFIO on linux requires passing the entire GPU to only a single VM and making it so the host doesn't have access.

Sorry again, is this like nVidia MIG? That seems to be the more current technology. Not sure if the host can retain a slice though.

Kind of, i'm not to familiar with the enterprise gpu sharing, but I believe that requires hardware support for it on the GPU to split up contexts for the OS. Whereas the GPU-P solution works on any GPU and is vendor agnostic as it's done on the OS/Processor level. It's really cool and I have no idea how they can ship this since it does trample on the enterprise tech pretty substantially. But I belive it's a byproduct of Microsoft wanting to compete on the datacenter level and it gives them a killer feature for Azure, and as a byproduct it entered as a semi undocumented feature into consumer hyper-v.

Thanks for the knowledge share!

MIG does need hardware suppoet, and from what I understand really expensive licensing. I don't know if AMD has a parallel technology.

That is pretty cool that it is vendor agnostic. I've found a few docs from a few years ago talking about stuff like it on Linux, but development of it seems to have stopped or just not progressed at all.

But she is they would use it in Azure, I imagine there they are using enterprise GPUs. But in Andheri scale datacenters it definitely sounds like an advantage!

It's probably overkill for what he wants though. A headless Linux server frees up the GPU for a gaming VM, and he can run containers natively for everything else.

If its just a few simple things you list, I might stick with HyperV. If you care about more sophisticated VLAN'ed networking setups I would probably go proxmox. But hardware passthru is a can of worms so understand there will be a tradeoff.

I actually use Proxmox on my main PC. Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, RTX 4070, AMD 6500XT. The two GPU's are each passed to a Windows and Debian VM respectively, and each also gets a USB card passed for convenience. I run half a dozen other VM's off of it hosting various portions of the standard homelab media/automation stacks.

Anecdotally, it's a very effective setup when combined with a solid KVM. I like keeping my main Debian desktop and the hypervisor separate because it keeps me from borking my whole lab with an accidental rm -rf.

It is possible to pass all of a systems GPU's to VM's, using exclusively the web interface/shell for administration, but it can cause some headaches when there are issues unrelated to the system itself. For example, if I lose access to the hypervisor over the network, getting the system back online can be a bit of a PITA as you can no longer just plug it into a screen to update any static network configuration. My current solution to this is enabling DHCP on Proxmox and managing the IP with static mappings at the router level.

There are a few other caveats to passing all of the GPU's that I could detail further, but as a low impact setup (like running emulators on a TV) its should work fairly well. I have also found that Proxmox plays well with mini PC's. Besides the desktop, I run it on an Intel NUC as well as a Topton mini PC with a bunch of high-speed NICS as a router. I cluster them without enabling the high availability features in order to unify the control plane for the three systems into one interface. It all comes together into a pretty slick system

Can someone explain why it is useful to do do virtualization at all when you just want to run a small amount of things like this?

I have a ubuntu server install running on an old laptop to do very basic background jobs, backups, automation, run some containers etc. – am I missing something by not using a hypervisor? What are the benefits?

Some software really prefers to control the whole host, usually highly integrated stuff. Some examples:

- Unifi Controller installs like a half dozen dependencies to run (Mongo, Redis, etc last time I used it), much easier to isolate all that in a VM

- Home Assistant's preferable and most blessed install method is Home Assistant OS, which is an entire distribution. I've run HA in Docker myself before but the experience is like 10x better if you just let it control the OS itself

- I have Plex,Sonarr,Radarr, etc running for media - there is software called Saltbox which integrates all of these things for you so that you don't need to configure 10 different things. Makes it a breeze, but requires a specific version of Ubuntu or you're in unsupported territory (kinda defeating the purpose)

Lots of stuff you can be totally fine just using Docker or installing directly onto the host. But having the bare metal system running Proxmox from that start gives you a ton of flexibility to handle other scenarios.

Worst case you just setup a single VM & run your stuff on it if you have no need for other types of installs. Nothing lost, but you gain flexibility in the future as well as easy backups via snapshotting, etc

Easy backups via snapshotting is quick to say, but has an outsized benefit IME. My go-to approach for keeping many of my machines up to date is now scheduled apt get update; apt get upgrade and relying on scheduled backups in the unlikely event that goes awry. I don't have to worry about package interdependencies across machines.

For major upgrades, I may go a step further and do a manual snapshot before upgrading and then decide whether or not to commit (usually) or rollback (easy, when needed).

The (emotional) security provided by this is nice, as is the time-savings (after initial time expense to learn and setup the base proxmox infrastructure).

HomeAssistant also does some voodoo with Bluetooth, wifi, ipv6 and mDns for IOT devices. For this reason it seems best suited to a host machine instead of a docker container.

Something like HomeAssistant, it would be good if it had an agent to handle all the low-level networking stuff that could be run directly on the host, and then all the other stuff which doesn’t directly require that can run inside an unprivileged Docker container.

Install Linux. Don't use Windows, if you are not forced to do it

Proxmox is great. I personally run unraid which is amazing. Very stable, very powerful

I love proxmox

I've used this and It's been the easiest way to set up proxmox, configure the updates, and add HAOS to it. I have this bookmarked so I can recreate it later.

Why proxmox and not simply using libvirt? I am very happy with kvm, but always looking to make my life better.

Proxmox will no doubt make your life better: very robust tools already there, no need to re-invent the wheel

Wondering the same. Also a libvirt and virsh user here, and pretty happy using commands such as `virsh snapshot-create ...`. I've used VMWare ESXi in the distant past, and from the screenshots it looks like Proxmox is maybe inspired by VMWare? So maybe a more polished and integrated GUI based experience than libvirt? Also looks like Proxmox supports containers in addition to virtual machines. Also I see from other comments that there's some features to migrate VMs between hosts, which would be a much more manual effort with libvirt.

Yeah, that’s basically it, it’s an ESXi style management UI that just makes everything really easy. In our little setup I used libvirt on an old server, Proxmox on the new one, and now I’ll probably shift the old server too to Proxmox due to the clustering (for example, you log onto one machine and can manage them all).

ZFS support that just works is really nice too. They also have a backup solution I’d like to check out but haven’t yet.

Good GUIs for great software are really compelling.

I'm a virsh/kvm user myself, but I admit I'd probably leverage more features of the platform if the interface was easier to use.

I've had like 75% success on throwing XML files at ChatGPT and telling it what I want to do for weird things like passthrough or pinning. It gets me most of the way there. That is not a compelling user interface as is. :)

This looks great, will have to try it out soon.

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