Howdy selfhosters
I’ve got a bit of an interesting one that started as a learning experience but it’s one I think I got a bit over my head in. I had been running the arr stack via docker-compose on my old Ubuntu desktop pc. I got lucky with a recycler and managed to get a decent old workstation and my company tossed out some 15 SAS hdds. Thankfully those worked. I managed to get the proxmox setup finally and got a few drives mounted in a zfs pool that plex presently reads from. I unfortunately failed to manage to save a last backup copy of my old stack, however that one I’ll admit was a bit messy with using gluetun with a vpn tie to a German server for p2p on the stack. I did preserve a lot of my old data though as a migration for the media libraries.
I’m open to suggestions to have the stack running again on proxmox on the work station, I’m not sure how best to go about it with this since accessing a mount point is only accessible via lxc containers and I can’t really figure how to pass the zfs shares to a vm. I feel like I’m over complicating this but needing to maintain a secure connection since burgerland doesn’t make for the best arr stack hosts in my experience. It feels a bit daunting as I’ve tried to tackle it and give a few LLMs to write me up some guidelines to make it easier but I seemed to just not be able to make that work to teach me.
I was recently trying out proxmox and found it super overkill and complex for serving stacks of software.
I switched to portainer and it was so much nicer to work with for that use case.
The one thing I miss is that proxmox can be packaged as an OS so you don’t need to worry about any setup. But I wrote a little script I can use to install portainer and configure systemd to make sure it’s always running.
I just started with portainer so I’m not an expert, but you may want to look into it.
Yeah it’s a bit of an unfair comparison that. Hypervisor VS conainer manager.
The reason you run Proxmox is to do «everything» in one place, including docker.
If all you host are containers, then I agree it’s overkill, but if you want VM’s and containers combined, maybe even in a cluster, then Proxmox is hard to beat.
I host LXC’s with Portainer inside Proxmox, as I find it easier to deal with and maintain. Then in a VM I run the full HomeAssistant OS instead of the Docker image.
Unless you don’t need it at all, I’d recommend you give it another try. It’s a very flexible system that «does it all» once you get going.
I understand they have different purposes, but one (container manager) seems far more suited to the typical things that people want to do in their homelabs, which is to host applications and application stacks.
Rarely do I see people need an interactive virtualized environment (in homelabs), except to set up those aforementioned applications, and then containers and containers stack definitions are better because having declarative way to deploy applications is better. Self-hosting projects often provide docker/OCI containers and compose files as the official way to deploy. I’m not deep in the community yet, but so far that has been my experience.
Additionally, some volume mounting options I wanted to use are only available via CLI, which is frustrating.
So I don’t really understand what value proposition proxmox provides that has causes homelabs folks to rally around it so passionately.
Having a one-stop-shop that can run VMs is handy for those last-resort scenarios where using an application container just isn’t possible, but thankfully I haven’t run into that yet. It doesn’t seem like OP has run into that yet either, if I read it correctly.
I’m not deep into my self-hosting journey, but it doesn’t seem like there are that many things that require a VM for hypervisor 🤞
You’re not wrong, but I think you might be leaving some future capabilities on the table, that’s it.
There is nothing wrong with running everything through Portainer at all. It’s how I started myself. The downside is that it’s limited if you ever wish to do e.g. HA OS or a sandboxed OS for testing/playing around. Automatic backups, re-sizing LXC’s or giving more memory is also easier to do with a GUI than in CLI. At least for me hehe.
That’s the great thing about self hosting though: if you’re happy with it, then it’s perfect!
Don’t change anything because someone tells you to if it works for you, friend!
Proxmox isn’t really comparable to Docker (or its 3rd party webui frontends) and was never meant to directly run user-facing services. Proxmox simply provides the virtual infrastructure required to host VMs and LXCs that will run your desired services.
IMO, Dockge (not a typo) is a far cleaner and easier solution than Portainer. Its very simple to set up and can easily link to other Dockge instances on other Docker hosts (I have like 4 or 5 VMs just for Docker). It also doesn’t bury your compose files deep inside a specific Docker volume that only allows its own container to access…like Portainer does.
Yeah I looked into dockge and I really like it, but I still went with portainer because it manages volumes directly rather than having to mount it manually and modify fstab.
I have to admit I don’t really understand the philosophy or value proposition of portainer as it relates specifically to homelabs, because I don’t really understand the value of VMs or LXCs except as last resorts (when you can’t make an application container, since defining applications declaratively almost always better).
Almost everything I want to host, and I see people talking about hosting in their homelabs, are stacks of applications, which makes something like docker compose perfect for purpose.
When I saw proxmox supported OCI containers, I was hopeful it’d provide a nice way to deploy a stack of OCI containers, but it didn’t. And in fact, some volume mounting features (that I wanted) could only be accessed by CLI.