Hacker News Reader

Comment by avtar | Hacker News Reader

I would see Proxmox come up in so many homelab type conversations so I tried 8.* on a mini pc. The impression I got was that the project probably provides the most value in a clustered environment or even on a single node if someone prefers using a web UI. What didn't seem very clear was an out-of-box way for declaring VM and container configurations [1] that could then be version controlled. Common approaches seemed to involve writing scripts or reach for other tools like Ansible. Whereas something like LXD/Incus makes this easier [2] by default. Or maybe I'm missing some details?

[1] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/default-settings-of-contai...

[2] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/instances_...

View on HN

I have similar feelings.

I really wish proxmox had nicer container support.

If a proxmox container config could specify a dockerfile as an option, I think proxmox would be 1000% more useful (and successful)

Instead with LXC and their config files, I feel like i have to put on a sysadmin hat to get a container going. Seems like picking up an adding machine to do my taxes.

(also, lxc does have a way to specify a container, but it is not used)

Instead I have written scripts to automate some of this, which helps,

There is also cloud-init, but I found it sort of unfriendly and never went anywhere with it.

There are various terraform providers for proxmox.

Yeah, this is the way. You end up treating Proxmox like it is AWS and asserting your desired state against it.

You don't. The existing providers only deal with spinning up VMs and containers.

Most of the operations and configurations that exist in Proxmox are not present in the providers, like SDN, firewall and the various storage options. The reason is that the API is all over the place and really badly documented.

Note that I still quite like the product. I have a 2- (soon to be 3-) node cluster at home and at this moment I have no plans to migrate away from it.

I looked into Incus but it's also far from mature, with an API and general data structure being full of inconsistencies, and again the documentation is not quite there.

cloud-init support is sorely missed.

Proxmox has had cloud-init support for a while and we have been using it for several years in production.

Doesn't work for LXC as far as I can tell

Reply on news.ycombinator.com