Man, I’ve been living and working in Germany for close to 10 years now. Proxmox is like that 50yo colleague of mine. Hard worker, reliable, really knowledgeable, a treasure trove of info, but he can’t be budged. He insists on installing any new VM using the GUI (both Windows and Linux), he avoids learning “new things” like Docker or Kubernetes, and really distrusts “the cloud”.
I will keep using Proxmox, as I have for many years both at work and at home, but we are migrating from a VM (with Docker) setup to Kubernetes. It would have been great for Proxmox to offer some support there, but…
I do the same in Proxmox VMs, in my homelab, which is… fine. I was talking more about native support, manageable via an API or something.
Say I need to increase the number of nodes in my cluster. I spin up a new VM using the template I have, adjust the network configuration, update the packages, add it to the cluster. Oh, maybe I should also do an update on all of them while I’m there, because now the new machine runs a different docker version. I have some Ansible and bash scripts that automates most of this. It works for my homelab.
At work however, I have a handful of clusters, with dozens of nodes. The method above can become tedious fast and it’s prone to human errors. We use external Kubernetes as a service platforms (think DOKS, EKS, etc), who have Terraform providers available. So I open my Terraform config and increase the number of nodes in one of my pre-production clusters from 9 to 11. I also change the version from 1.32 to 1.33. I then push my changes to a new merge request, my Gitlab CI spins up, who calls Atlantis to run a terraform plan, I check the results and ask it to apply. It takes 2 minutes. I would love to see this work with Proxmox.
I know what you mean, but just saying that Proxmox absolutely has an Api that can do a few (not all) of these things - and some are potentially use cases for the data centre manager.
But yeah, I know what you mean.
I’ve automated deployment with SDNET and templates, but the other stuff you’re doing with terraform is more akin “Orchestration” There must be some GUI for terraform that works with proxmox.
I guess you could do the same with expansible and playbooks but it sounds like you’re looking for something with a GUI that does the work for you.
I can’t think of any, but proxmox does have an API … wondering why no one has done this yet …
I don’t use any GUI… I use terraform in the terminal or via CI/CD. There is an API and also a Terraform provider for Proxmox, and I can use that, together with Ansible and shell scripts to manage VMs, but I was looking for k8s support.
Again, it works fine for small environments, with a bit of manual work and human intervention, but for larger ones, I need a bit more. I moved away from a few VMs acting as k8s nodes, to k8s as a service (at work).
Is Proxmox really a VMware competitor? I mean it is another virtualization system but even like Hyper-V these days is not as big of a shitshow as it once was and it much closer in functionality to VMWare. And as jank as it is I’m seeing companies move to Nutanix over Proxmox
Interesting, no mention of proxmox
Man, I’ve been living and working in Germany for close to 10 years now. Proxmox is like that 50yo colleague of mine. Hard worker, reliable, really knowledgeable, a treasure trove of info, but he can’t be budged. He insists on installing any new VM using the GUI (both Windows and Linux), he avoids learning “new things” like Docker or Kubernetes, and really distrusts “the cloud”.
I will keep using Proxmox, as I have for many years both at work and at home, but we are migrating from a VM (with Docker) setup to Kubernetes. It would have been great for Proxmox to offer some support there, but…
not sure what the big deal is, I’m running a docker lab with portrainer inside a proxmox LXC
I do the same in Proxmox VMs, in my homelab, which is… fine. I was talking more about native support, manageable via an API or something.
Say I need to increase the number of nodes in my cluster. I spin up a new VM using the template I have, adjust the network configuration, update the packages, add it to the cluster. Oh, maybe I should also do an update on all of them while I’m there, because now the new machine runs a different docker version. I have some Ansible and bash scripts that automates most of this. It works for my homelab.
At work however, I have a handful of clusters, with dozens of nodes. The method above can become tedious fast and it’s prone to human errors. We use external Kubernetes as a service platforms (think DOKS, EKS, etc), who have Terraform providers available. So I open my Terraform config and increase the number of nodes in one of my pre-production clusters from 9 to 11. I also change the version from 1.32 to 1.33. I then push my changes to a new merge request, my Gitlab CI spins up, who calls Atlantis to run a
terraform plan, I check the results and ask it to apply. It takes 2 minutes. I would love to see this work with Proxmox.I know what you mean, but just saying that Proxmox absolutely has an Api that can do a few (not all) of these things - and some are potentially use cases for the data centre manager. But yeah, I know what you mean.
Interesting,
I’ve automated deployment with SDNET and templates, but the other stuff you’re doing with terraform is more akin “Orchestration” There must be some GUI for terraform that works with proxmox.
I guess you could do the same with expansible and playbooks but it sounds like you’re looking for something with a GUI that does the work for you.
I can’t think of any, but proxmox does have an API … wondering why no one has done this yet …
I don’t use any GUI… I use terraform in the terminal or via CI/CD. There is an API and also a Terraform provider for Proxmox, and I can use that, together with Ansible and shell scripts to manage VMs, but I was looking for k8s support.
Again, it works fine for small environments, with a bit of manual work and human intervention, but for larger ones, I need a bit more. I moved away from a few VMs acting as k8s nodes, to k8s as a service (at work).
The mentioned products have had major releases recently. Has anything major happened with Proxmox recently?
Is Proxmox really a VMware competitor? I mean it is another virtualization system but even like Hyper-V these days is not as big of a shitshow as it once was and it much closer in functionality to VMWare. And as jank as it is I’m seeing companies move to Nutanix over Proxmox