I’m still running a 6th-generation Intel CPU (i5-6600k) on my media server, with 64GB of RAM and a Quadro P1000 for the rare 1080p transcoding needs. Windows 10 is still my OS from when it was a gaming PC and I want to switch to Linux. I’m a casual user on my personal machine, as well as with OpenWRT on my network hardware.
Here are the few features I need:
- MergerFS with a RAID option for drive redundancy. I use multiple 12TB drives right now and have my media types separated between each. I’d like to have one pool that I can be flexible with space between each share.
- Docker for *arr/media downloaders/RSS feed reader/various FOSS tools and gizmos.
- I’d like to start working with Home Assistant. Installing with WSL hasn’t worked for me, so switching to Linux seems like the best option for this.
Guides like Perfect Media Server say that Proxmox is better than a traditional distro like Debian/Ubuntu, but I’m concerned about performance on my 6600k. Will LXCs and/or a VM for Docker push my CPU to its limits? Or should I do standard Debian or even OpenMediaVault?
I’m comfortable learning Proxmox and its intricacies, especially if I can move my Windows 10 install into a VM as a failsafe while building a storage pool with new drives.
Yes, but no. There is still a lot of places using old fashioned VMs, my company is still building VMs from an AWS ami and running ansible to install all the stuff we need. Some places will move to containers and that’s great, but containers won’t solve every problem
Yes, it’s fine to still have VMs, but you shouldn’t be building out new applications and new environments on VMs or LXC.
The only VMs I’ve seen in production at my customers recently are application test environments for applications that require kernel access. Those test environments are managed by software running in containers, and often even use something like Openshift Virtualization so that the entire VM runs inside a container.
That’s a bold statement, VMs might be just fine for some.
Use what ever is best for you, if thats containers great. If that’s a VM, sure. Just make sure you keep it secure.
Some of us don’t build applications, we use them as built by other companies. If we’re really unlucky they refuse to support running on a VM.
Yeah, that’s fair. I have set up Openshift Virtualization for customers using 3rd party appliances. I’ve even worked on some projects where a 3rd party appliance is part of the original spec for the cluster, so installing Openshift Virtualization to run VMs is part of the day 1 installation of the Kubernetes cluster.