I see people having a small 8 gigs and 4 core system and trying to split that with something like proxmox into multiple VMs. I think that’s not the best way to utilise the resources.
As many services are mostly in ideal mode so in case something is running it should be possible to use the complete power of the machine.
My opinion is using docker and compose to manage things on the whole hardware level for smaller homelab.
Only split VMs for something critical, even decide on that if it’s required.
Do you agree?
It depends on your goals of course.
Personally, I use Proxmox on a couple machines for a couple reasons:
- It’s way way easier to backup an entire VM than it is to backup a bare metal physical device. And when you back up a VM, because the VM is “virtual hardware” you can (and I have) restore it to the same machine or to brand new hardware easily and it will “just work”. This is especially useful in the case that hardware dies.
- I want high availability. A few things I do in my homelab, I personally concider “critical” to my home happiness. They aren’t really critical, but I don’t want to be without them if I can avoid it. And by having multiple proxmox hosts, I get automatic failover. If one machine dies or crashes, the VMs automatically start up on the other machine.
Is that overkill? Yes. But I wouldn’t say it “doesn’t make sense”. It makes sense but just isn’t necessary.
Fudge topping on ice cream isn’t necessary either, but it sure is nice.
No.
Stop telling people what to do with their hardware. Its THEIR hardware.
Easy.
It all comes down to “what are you trying to do.”
Not everyone runs applications, so docker is not the answer to everything.
But if you only have 8Gb of RAM and are trying to run VMs then I’d advise you to go buy more RAM.
I run about 30 stacks (about 60 containers) on my 1L mini pc with i5 8500T + 12 GB RAM. If i were to split them in their own VMs it would be impossible to do. I would have run out of resources probably on fourth VM :D. 5.8 GB RAM is free on idle and i also have ZRAM enabled. I work on it too i have code-server and cloudbeaver running on it. I never run out of memory. Although i am thinking to upgrade it to 16 GBs. I know RAM IS CHEAP but i do not need more then 16 GBs on this PC.
This setup also does not need to be so complex. I have stacks in their own networks isolated and access them solely from wireguard VPN no matter where i am on LAN or connecting from WAN. Wireguard is always on on my laptop and phone.
Home Assistant for example is much easier to manage when running on its own OS. At the same time, I don’t want to dedicate a whole server for Home Assistant so I use ProxMox to split up Home Assistant and have another Linux VM to run all my other docker based services.