What is YOUR Hypervisor Setup?

[wsoteros]

Whatever you happen to be running we want to hear about it! What has and hasn't worked for you in the past? Feel free to share your setups or ideas below!

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Good
VirtualBox on Intel Macs.

OK
TrueNAS CORE

Better
Proxmox

 

[danb35]

Primary:
Proxmox. A four-node cluster (two nodes of a Dell C6220 II, one Dell R630, and one Microserver Gen10+_ and two separate standalone hosts.

Occasional:
VirtualBox. Handy for occasional tasks on a desktop. Mainly used to run a Windows 7 installation with an old version of Java, to access the IPMI virtual console of the C6220s.

One Ubuntu VM on TrueNAS CORE, running Pi-Hole for my parents. It's kind of flaky.

Playing with:
xcp-ng

 

[Jailer]

Proxmox for just playing around and learning new things.

Virtualbox on the desktop mainly for checking out new linux desktop distros and basic experimentation.

Mildly interested in xcp-ng and may take that for a spin on a spare white box I have sitting around.

Just curious, why run a cluster in a home lab? What is the benefit?

 

[danb35]

Just curious, why run a cluster in a home lab? What is the benefit?

It's surely overkill for my use case (which seems to be a common theme, hmmm...). But at various times I've had a lot of VMs running, which eat a lot of RAM--more than I have in any one server at some times. Being able to spread them across a few hosts, while managing all of them from a single interface, is handy.

Second, clustered storage. Proxmox includes Ceph, which provides clustered VM storage with redundancy.

Third, high availability. If a host goes down, its running VMs can be automatically migrated to another host in the cluster, so there's minimal (if any) downtime of those VMs.

Necessary? Hardly. But it does have its benefits.

 

[Jailer]

It's surely overkill for my use case

Oh I get that for sure. Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess right?

I've been mildly interested in CEPH but I just don't have any use case for it. There's nothing mission critical that I run that would benefit from a CEPH cluster. I get someone setting it up to practice and learn for a job "in the biz" but that's not me hence the question. I'm just exploring options and trying to learn as much as I can for when I have to migrate some services off CORE when it goes EOL.

 

[NugentS]

3 Node VMWAre esxi/vsphere (currently one broken)
TN Not Virtualised

 

[Pitfrr]

Actual: VMware with FreeNAS running as a VM

Looking into: Proxmox (with TrueNAS as a VM)

 

[maxx74]

Whatever you happen to be running we want to hear about it! What has and hasn't worked for you in the past? Feel free to share your setups or ideas below!

I use xcp-ng wich is xen based on 7 hosts.
Truenas as a nfs server for the disk images, so can be shared accross host for live migrations.
in the past i was very happy with everything. only data vdev. 5 ssd drives.

Now trying to switch to a new truenas install with every best option i can reach.
Base hw is HPE DL380 G10 with 256 GB ram, 8 SATA slots+ 8 nvme slots
i can't go ower 200-250MB/s on big files, 5GB and more.
i tryed a SSD only config, with an w/o zlog devices, lz4 compression enabled and disabled.
SSD are Seagate 125 wich performed good in the previous trunas install.
Also added a couple of Seagate nytro 5350 for
Tryed z-1 and z-2 config for datadev

anything to lok for ?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

We run all modern (64 bit, UEFI) VMs on a pair of TrueNAS CORE systems. See my signature for hardware details. Has been working great since we introduced them about 5 years ago.

For legacy VMs (2 systems with 32 bit OSes that we have to keep around) I have a single HP microserver with "official" HP hardware RAID and VMware image from HP.

I started investigating other products, because even with nightly backups to a TrueNAS CORE ZFS pool - where to boot them in a year or two if the HP breaks and I need to whip up a quick replacement?

So I downloaded Proxmox today. What a disappointment ... installed on one small SSD with Ext4, wanted to add the large 1 TB NVMe SSD in that system as a zpool and some swap space ... there is no storage *management* whatsoever in this product. I cannot manage disks, pools, file systems, swap space ... and this is the leading open source solution?

I installed Dragonfish instead now. Let's see if I can migrate my two VMs over.

 

[danb35]

storage *management* whatsoever in this product.

...in the web UI. Unlike TrueNAS, Proxmox doesn't operate on a "do it through the GUI or don't do it at all" model. And you surely know how to create a pool. I'm more bothered that you can't replace a device in a mirrored boot pool through the GUI, but at least it's well-documented how to do it at the CLI.

But swap? If you're using swap on a hypervisor, seems like things are pretty dire.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

...in the web UI. Unlike TrueNAS, Proxmox doesn't operate on a "do it through the GUI or don't do it at all" model.

I prefer that model when setting up mission critical appliances that might have more people than me as their operators.
Either all UI or no UI. FreeBSD and Ansible. Great. But a system replacing ESXi should have all relevant aspects manageable through a UI.

But swap? If you're using swap on a hypervisor, seems like things are pretty dire.

I want all of my Unix systems not to use but to have swap. And tools like Observium or Icinga alerting me when the system starts using it. Better than killing random processes. I still think swap is essential for a certain kind of resiliency, i.e. peaks in memory usage.

None of my systems have less than memory/2 in swap space. 20 years ago that was 2*memory or even 4*memory.

 

[danb35]

Fair enough, and I agree I'd prefer that as well. I don't consider it a deal-breaker as you seem to though. I don't believe xcp-ng has any such capability either, but I haven't checked recently.

 

[LanMan]

Greetings,
I was able to bring home an older server that we replaced from my office and initially wanted to run VMWare as to mimic my work environment but this particular server does not support 7.0 so I am running Proxmox on my HP DL380 Gen 10 with 512 GB RAM installed and approx. 3 TB usable drive space. I found that Proxmox delivers the experience of a virtualized environment better than other products and since it is free, well, that is a no brainer.
I try and mimic as much of my work environment as I can for testing purposes.