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 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!