[HN Gopher] Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts: Make managing yo...
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Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts: Make managing your Proxmox
homelab a breeze
Author : BramSuurdje
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-11-12 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (community-scripts.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (community-scripts.github.io)
| prettyStandard wrote:
| A bit of a tangent. I've been trying to manage libvirt& Unraid
| through terraform, but have run into issue after issue. I'm about
| given up, and will just manage the virtual machines manually...
|
| 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?
| beardbound wrote:
| proxmox is using KVM for virtualization and Linux Containers
| (LXC) for the containers. I agree that something like terraform
| and/or ansible would make more sense for an IAC (infrastructure
| as code) deployment. Most of the people I talk to that use
| proxmox for a homelab prefer to do things manually and don't
| bother with any IAC implementation.
|
| 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.
| daqnz wrote:
| It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS making
| snapshotting quick and Proxmox also has a very good backup
| system.
|
| 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
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'll definitely look into the docker LXC and Home Assistant VM.
| I'd been using docker in a VM on proxmox, successfully mind you,
| but perhaps there's some more efficiency to squeeze...
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| HAOS as a VM on proxmox works well.
|
| I used some of tteck's helper scripts to set up mqtt and
| zigbee2mqtt LXC containers with a passthrough of the USB zigbee
| device.
| daqnz wrote:
| The scripts for both these projects work very well. I would
| recommend Home Assistant HAOS in a VM over a LXC or docker.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605
| WaxProlix wrote:
| I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s
| setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but
| being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs.
| With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs
| (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a
| project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible.
|
| It's also just not amenable to automation or reproducible builds
| in the same way as an established pod manager like Kubernetes:
| there's no support that I can find for Terraform, and so you're
| stuck with regular full-disk backups and maybe some
| Chef/Ansible/Puppet tooling, which I don't want to invest in
| [re]learning.
|
| Still, very cool resource management and passthrough model, and
| it's easy to set up and maintain, with a nice control panel.
| tombert wrote:
| I've pretty thoroughly drunk the NixOS Kool-aid.
|
| For awhile I ran Docker Swarm with a bunch of SBCs, then k8s,
| then just a big server running Ubuntu + Cockpit, then Proxmox,
| until I have finally settled on NixOS.
|
| NixOS has decent container support if necessary, but I've found
| that its declarative nature means I almost never bother with
| containers. "Uninstalling" something is generally as simple as
| "remove it from the config file, rebuild", and it's not hard to
| do cgroupey stuff if you need to manage memory and the like.
|
| Not to mention that I think NixOS's nginx DSL is wonderful.
| It's so nice being able to have my proxy configs (along with
| LetsEncrypt) managed directly (and correctly) by the config
| environment instead of me writing my own scripts and the like.
|
| (I'm not sure if there are any distributed NixOS things,
| because I could totally see something neat being built on
| Flakes)
|
| My homelab has never been simpler and I've never been happier
| with it.
| daqnz wrote:
| Any reason you didn't go NixOS in a Proxmox VM? The advantage
| would not be having to do a full reinstall if anything went
| wrong and being able to spin up other OS' if needed. The
| downside would be a few percentage of performance loss.
| KAMSPioneer wrote:
| It's certainly a different model of deployment. I like it,
| though it does have its warts.
|
| However there is a (community) TF module...?
| https://registry.terraform.io/providers/Telmate/proxmox/late...
| (I have no experience with it as I typically reach for
| Ansible).
|
| Also, easy-to-install ZFS makes it hard for me to cajol myself
| into trying something else. And if I want k8s for play time I
| can always spin up (a/some) VM(s).
| tupilaq wrote:
| I've used this[1] Terraform provider together with the Talos[2]
| distribution for deploying a Kubernetes cluster. I agree that
| the APIs available with Proxmox are not fully featured, but it
| more than suits my needs.
|
| I'm running a four node cluster on salvaged SFF machines
| backing up lvm snapshots to home brewed TruNAS storage and it
| all makes me happy.
|
| ----
|
| [1] https://github.com/Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox
|
| [2] https://factory.talos.dev/
| frantathefranta wrote:
| You probably know this but it's good to run a cluster with an
| odd number of nodes. You don't even need another full node,
| just a quorum node like a RPi.
| tupilaq wrote:
| Yes, of course.. I'm actually in the process of replacing
| nodes. The original 3x Ryzen5 4-core 32Gb hosts are being
| replaced by Ryzen9 12-core 96Gb hosts.. its just taking a
| bit of time. As long as I only ever take one down for
| updates at a time, its no bother for a home-lab
| environment.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Have you tried incus?
|
| https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
| doubled112 wrote:
| I moved my Proxmox single node home-prod setup to Incus over
| the last couple of weeks.
|
| Incus feels a lot less...legacy? Old school? Something.
|
| Not a lot different when it gets down to it though. It's
| easier to work at the CLI with Incus. Backups are a little
| less straight forward.
| unixhero wrote:
| Proxmox isn't legacy, far from it.
| j45 wrote:
| Different technologies are for different approaches and
| applications.
|
| It's relatively trivial to use the pve command line utility to
| create or modify vms in proxmox.
|
| Still, the originating reason of this post is due to a large
| number of useful scripts to help make things more manageable
| and maintainable, and the founder of it having to step away,
| and there being gratitude for their help to make things much
| more manageable.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| I hadn't intended to take away from that. And I've used these
| scripts myself for spinning up resources - they're definitely
| a help.
| daqnz wrote:
| > Still, the originating reason of this post is due to a
| large number of useful scripts to help make things more
| manageable and maintainable
|
| Also makes it very quick to try out an application, arguably
| less time than even docker.
| globular-toast wrote:
| But you can just chuck Kubernetes nodes on Proxmox? I have my
| nodes running on XCP-ng. The beauty of running a hypervisor is
| maximum flexibility. I can try out different distros etc,
| either for k8s nodes or otherwise. I run my router on there
| (opnsense). I can play with stuff like nix and guix and could
| even install Windows if for some reason I wanted to.
| placardloop wrote:
| Proxmox doesn't preclude you from having k8s. You can create
| VM(s) in Proxmox and then install k8s on them, then run your
| app workloads in k8s.
|
| You do have to treat Proxmox VMs like "pets, not cattle" since
| they are more difficult to automate, but that's the same story
| as if you were managing your k8s host on bare metal too. The
| benefit with Proxmox-hosted VMs though is that you can use
| Proxmox for whole-VM backups and migrations, so you can have
| the best of both proxmox and k8s!
| daqnz wrote:
| Along with the submitter, I am also on the team of maintainers
| who volunteered to help with maintenance of this project after
| tteck's sad news that they were entering hospice (1). The team
| members are all motivated individuals, who are enthusiastic on
| carrying on tteck's legacy.
|
| We are moving forward in a transparent manner and I am more than
| happy to answer any questions.
|
| (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605
| lotophage wrote:
| Oh wow, this is truely sad news.
|
| I only recently went down the homelab/selfhosted path and the
| majority of my containers were setup using tteck's scripts.
| daqnz wrote:
| > Oh wow, this is truely sad news.
|
| Incredibly sad. It's a real testament to tteck that he took
| the time to transition the project, and make his wishes known
| how he wanted us to proceed. Tteck is a legend.
| sgc wrote:
| I have been looking into setting up my first Proxmox box, here is
| my take as a newcomer.
|
| I wanted to do what I think is a very basic and very common
| setup: Modem > proxmox box > OPNsense VM > physical wifi router
| via onboard 10Gb NIC + internal network VMs like OMV etc. The
| goal is to add a full network filter via OPNsense, and allow
| access to a media sever and backup etc from the internal network.
|
| I see no OPNsense, OMV script is basically contra-indicated
| because it should be a VM instead of the LXC container, and I
| don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other,
| which is an important part of Proxmox configuration. So it looks
| like there is room here to get some basic setup scripts for a
| simple home server either improved or added to the collection.
| TheSmiddy wrote:
| > I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other
|
| I'm confused by what you mean here? Don't they just use the
| network like any other computer?
|
| I haven't had to do any special configuration to get my VMs to
| talk to each other.
| daqnz wrote:
| There is no OPNSense script I think historically in part
| because any misconfig could expose the Promox instance to the
| world. It is easy enough for advanced users to spin up a VM
| with the ISO. There has been a request for a OPNSense script
| made recently.
|
| I agree with OMV. It certainly can be used as is, but not
| usually how people want to use it. A note was added to the
| script a few days ago.
|
| > I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other
|
| There is a Tailscale script which technically helps them talk
| to each other (over Tailscale) :)
|
| The scripts are designed to setup self contained LCX
| containers. We are trying to avoid building our own k8s.
| xrd wrote:
| Am I right that proxmox takes over your entire machine?
|
| I have been using a combination of docker and lxc/lxd to manage
| my VMs. But, cockpit (on ubuntu) does not give me a perfect
| experience for managing running VMS, etc.
|
| I wish there was a good solution for all of this. But, it feels
| like you need to cobble together a bunch of kibana tools to get
| true monitoring.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Yes, installing Proxmox is akin to installing ESXi.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I wanted to delegate management of my raid array to higher
| level tools since it died on me seemingly for nothing (I was
| able to recover all the drives but none of the files).
|
| I tried TrueNAS but it's very rigid. Proxmox seems to give you
| more control over what's installed on the server but it's also
| quite locked down. Don't remember exactly what was it that
| pushed me off Proxmox. I think it was that I needed to manage
| some VMs over LXD API and others over proxmox and I couldn't
| mix and match, I had to choose one without extra hacks.
| unixhero wrote:
| Monitoring is there in Proxmox
| mateus1 wrote:
| Heartwarming to see the community response here, long live tteck.
|
| I've just built my first homelab and have favored OpenMediaVault
| which seems better suited for my use.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| I doubt you have a whole lot of control over this, but this
| website is _misery_ to use on a phone. Browsing scripts gives you
| six or ten tiles per page, navigation buttons are _only_ in the
| header. There are no page numbers or any indication of progress.
| At a glance, there appears to be no way of filtering or sorting,
| although there is some arbitrary grouping being applied in the
| middle of the list. Also the script descriptions only show three
| lines of text, which is not nearly enough to give a clue to what
| the script is for.
|
| This is probably the worst implemented list view I've ever seen.
| Completely useless.
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(page generated 2024-11-12 23:00 UTC)