Great news! I started my selfhost journey over a year ago, and I’m finding myself needing better hardware. There’s so many services I want that my NAS can’t handle. And I unfortunately need to add GPU transcoding to my Jellyfin setup.
What’s the best OS for a machine focused on containers and (getting started with) VMs? I’ve heard Proxmox
What CPU specs should I be concerned about?
I’m willing to buy a pre-built as long as its hardware has sufficient longevity.
Why not use Proxmox to host the containers directly instead of using a VM? I know it’s easier to use this way but it kinda misses the point of using proxmox then
Not at all. Proxmox does a great job at hosting VMs and giving a control plane for them - but it does not do containers well. LXCs are a thing, and it hosts those - but never try to do docker in an LXC. (I tried so many different ways and guides and there were just too many caveats, and you end up always essentially giving root access to your containers, so it’s not great anyway). I’d like to see proxmox offer some sort of docker-first approach will it will manage volumes at the proxmox level, but they don’t seem concerned with that, and honestly if you’re doing that then you’re nearing kubernetes anyway.
Which is what I ended up doing - k3s on proxmox VMs. Proxmox handles the instances themselves, spins up a VM on each host to run k3s, and then I run k3s from within there. Same paradigm as the major cloud providers. GKE, AKS, and EKS all run k8s within a VM on their existing compute stack, so this fits right in.
Thanks for sharing your experience ! I was kinda interested for my new N300 if I should install promox+LXC-docker or promox+VM-docker !
Hearing you had a lot of issues and caveats makes my choice easier wihout even giving it a try ! So thanks !
Thanks for your point of view ! I’m still new to proxmox and I went the LXC route… Seems to be working well so far but time will tell!
That’s a great question…redundant ports and all that