What's the virtualization technology on proxmox?
What's the advantage to using something like this as opposed to terraform or salt stack or Ansible?
If you want to treat your self-hosted applications as "sheep" (1) , then terraform k8s etc. is a better bet.
But if you are happy to manually restore from a backup or snapshot when something goes wrong, or automatically have your LXC container shifted to different hardware if you have a cluster, then Proxmox is for you. The reality is that in a home setup you will spend about as much or less time maintaining your "pets" than than you would your "farm".
(1) I write this from New Zealand
No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff.
Cephs for clustering (hyperconverged) is very much a first class citizen. I generally only use EXT4 as a filesystem - keep it simple. XFS is lovely too, especially for reflinks if you need them.
(1) Wal and Cooch know how to run a farm (and so do I, in the UK!)
You are correct, it is optional and I should have made that clear. While optional it does have native support for ZFS and takes advantage of ZFS features, like instant snapshotting of LCX containers.
Proxmox only supports linear snapshots using ZFS (so no tree-like snapshots). This might be a deal-breaker for some usages.
You can likely manage the configuration of the VMs themselves through terraform or similar in combination with Proxmox if that's your desire.
For work I'm a firm believer in reproducible environments and IAC. We actually a combination of vagrant, libvirt, and KVM to spin up local clusters for quick testing and development. It works out pretty well, but in my homelab I don't have anything complicated enough to bother setting up terraform/ansible for. Although I imagine if my server crashed I probably wouldn't think that way anymore.
It's not suitable for open sourcing yet (embedded secrets and the like), but if the community wants it, it's pretty solid.
Only issue I see is the Ansible script currently always expects to be building a cluster of Proxmox hosts. I'd need to make some change to customise it so it can build out just one node though.
I've been using it or ~3 years now for my Proxmox cluster home lab which predominantly hosts LLAMA, *Arr stack, deluge, Nginx, Tailscale and a few other services.
It's not quite a one click deployment, but it can build our an entire cluster in 30 minutes after an initial Proxmox install is completed.
[1] https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox/issues/817
Just because someone doesn't use vagrant, libvirt and KVM to spin up local clusters manually, doesn't mean they don't know how.
There is no shortage of Proxmox users who grew up in datacentres from bare metal servers, to virtualization first coming out, and beyond.
- provision VMs with Terraform - configure/maintain your VM with something like Ansible
The provider also allows your to schedule LXC if you'd like to target that instead.