Advice/poll on switching away from Ubuntu for my VM host. - eviltoast

First off, I know ultimately I’m the only person who can decide if it’s worth it. But I was hoping for some input from your collective experience.

I have a server I built currently running Ubuntu 22.04. I’m using KVM/qemu to host VMs and have recently started exploring the exciting world of Docker, with a VM dedicated to Portainer. I manage the VMs with a mix of virt-manager via xRDP, cli tools, and (if I’m feeling extra lazy) Cockpit. Disks are spindles currently in software Raid 10 (md), and I use LVM to assign volumes to the KVM VMs. Backups are via a script I wrote to snapshot the LVM volume and back it up to B2 via restic.

It all works. Rather smoothly except when it doesn’t 😀.

I’ve been planning an HD upgrade and was considering using that as an excuse to start over. My thoughts are to either install Debian and continue with my status quo, or to give Proxmox a try. I’ve been reading alot of positive comments about it here and I have longed for one unified web interface to manage my VMs.

My main concerns are:

  1. Backups. I want to be able to backup to B2 but from what I’ve read I don’t see a way to do that. I don’t mean backup to a local repository and then sync that to B2. I’m talking direct to B2.
  2. Performance. People rave about ZFS, but I have no experience. Will I get at least equivalent performance out of ZFS and how much RAM will that cost me? Do I even need ZFS or can I just continue to store VMs the way I do today?

Having never used Proxmox to compare I’m really on the fence about this one. I’d appreciate any input. Thanks.

  • TrenchcoatFullOfBats@belfry.ripEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    Another vote for Proxmox.

    Backups: Proxmox Backup Server (yes, it can run in a Proxmox VM) is pretty great. You can use something like Duplicati to backup the PBS datastore to B2.

    Performance: You can use ZFS in Proxmox, or not. ZFS gets you things like snapshots and raidz, but you will want to make sure you have a good amount of RAM available and that you leave about 20% of available drive space free. This is a good resource on ZFS in Proxmox.

    Performance-wise, I have clusters with drives running ZFS and EXT4, and I haven’t really noticed much of a difference. But I’m also running low-powered SFF servers, so I’m not doing anything that requires a lot of heavy duty work.