New Year. New Hypervisor.

It’s a new year, and I think it’s time to migrate off ESXi and onto Proxmox. With VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and subsequent implosion, and ESXi’s stricter hardware requirements, I don’t want to deal with the hassle anymore. It’s too bad because I use vSphere at work and I like the product. EVC makes working on my homelab so much easier work with when I can live vMotion between hosts with different CPUs.

However, I have discovered Linux Containers (LXC), and I’m finding them to be a lot of fun. I had several services, each running in a VM previously, and they’ll still be running in a container now. I like how easy it is to set up a container and how quickly they start. Docker still annoys me, but I’m sure it’s because I’m not super familiar with it. I think one day I’ll probably get there, probably using something like Unraid for the host, but I’ll stick with LXC on Proxmox for now.

I’ve already migrated my Pi-Hole, Nginx Proxy Manager, Unifi Network Application, and Tautulli in just a few hours. There are some community scripts to make it easier to install these containers, but I’ve stuck with manual installs so far, except for Tautulli. The easy Tautulli install uses Snaps, and I read that Snaps might have issues with LXC, and I didn’t want to make host-wide config changes to make one service work.

I didn’t have good luck with Proxmox back in the v4.x and early v5.x days. I hope that v8.3 fares better, but then again I don’t have much choice. It’s either Proxmox or XCP-NG. Any issues I encounter, I’ll have to fix-forward.

Up next is trying to figure out the best way to host all this with my separate TrueNAS server. The eternal question: iSCSI vs NFS.

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