tl;dr: Proxmox or bare metal? Containers yes/no? What is your use case?
I used a Dell R710 when I first started self-hosting, it ran ESXi with one VM for each service I wanted. Restarting the server required me to first shutdown each VM in order and then the whole host. When setting up a new service to host I had to create a new VM (allocate RAM, disk etc), install the OS (I ran Debian) and then follow instructions for how to setup the service. This mostly was not a problem but one software I never managed to get working was Apache Guacamole.
Nowadays I have a Dell Optiplex I salvaged for parts, got a new case and all my HDDs from my R710. Because it has much less RAM and an old Intel i5 (6th or 7th generation), I decided to get into Docker. With Docker containers you write your compose file and it will just work. No more need to dig through documentation for which version of a dependency to use, how to handle if two services on the same host need different versions (this was part of the reason for one VM/service). With Docker, I can try out a software in seconds and have it configured to my liking in minutes.
Today I have NixOS (bare metal) and it comes with Podman which uses systemd. Hence restarting my OS (albeit not that often, almost never unless I mess up my config) is a no-brainer because Podman via systemd will manage everything. Adding, stopping or removing containers in general is easy. I have a script running as a service which will stop a container, create a BTRFS subvolume snapshot, start the service again and start borg backup to backup from the snapshot.
For me using Proxmox would just an extra layer of complexity I don’t need. I only have one server and I am the only user.
Questions:
- Do you use Proxmox instead of a bare metal installation?
- Do you use containers or do you install manually?
- What is you use case that requires your setup the way it is?
There are different reasons to run different things. Some apps are not able to be run as containers, or don’t make sense to run containerized.
VMs offer better isolation between systems, which is important for high-security applications.
Traditional Hypervisors also allow you to easily run fleets of completely different OSes on the same hardware, which you can’t do with containers.
On the other hand, if you want/need high scalability, extremely efficient resource usage, and you don’t need to run radically different OS environments simultaneously, containers, especially Docker containers or Podman containers are a great choice.
Incus containers are a great middle ground that I’m a fan of more than Docker/podman containers or traditional VMs. They are system containers, vs application containers like Docker/Podman.
That means they are actually full-fledged Linux distros by default, but are still much smaller than a traditional VM.
Also, for any of these solutions, if you’re constantly doing admin tasks manually, you’re doing it wrong. All modern platforms have APIs or other ways to interact with them via code.
For my own setup, I have everything. My main server runs XCP-ng for the hypervisor, and I have several traditional VMs on it, including my primary NAS. I also run a virtual Incus host that I have my Minecraft server running in, and some random other system containers. I have a Docker host VM, but I don’t really use it.
I also have my home media server which is a standalone system running TrueNAS on bare metal with Tailscale and Jellyfin running as Docker containers within TrueNAS.
My setup is messy because it has been built slowly over several years, and I don’t have enough time or energy to rip it all down and put it back together in a more optimal way.