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Any fellow XCP-ng users here?
Got invited to Tildes tangentially through a server hosting project but realized this space might be outside the standard tech echo-chambers (techo-chambers?). Am I the only XCP-ng/Xen user in a sea of Proxmox/KVM? Any odd homelab setups to share?
(hi, I am the one who invited you, welcome!)
I'm a "pile of containers on bare metal" sort of girl, which feels odd sometimes in a sea of hypervisors. You've seen the sort of deployment
pipelinesshort tubes I come up with :)My switch toward NixOS is relatively recent; before this I ran mostly Alpine servers with a custom "rsync-with-hooks" script. I talked about it briefly here when I wrote it*; it later gained more exciting features like "secrets management by dumping part of my bitwarden vault to /etc/secrets". My main home server is still using that mostly because I am lazy and it's not bothersome enough to replace it.
(* That post mentions moving toward ARM machines. This never happened because support for Linux on most SBCs continues to be in the form of "here's a SD card image with a weird Debian fork, we support nothing else".)
I'm a proxmox guy, but I run a nested version of XCP-ng.
I like it! Still prefer proxmox but different strokes different folks.
Curiosity: what's the use case for nested hypervisors?
Mostly just playing around and learning. I like to understand different virtualization platforms and nested is the best way for me. It doesn't run well but that's not really the point. I also tried a nested proxmox cluster in order to better understand how proxmox worked and boy that was a stupid experiment lol
Funnily enough I was thinking of going the other direction - XCP-ng under Proxmox. My "Home Server" is running Proxmox, but my "Host things for other people servers" are running in an XCP-ng cluster. Have you had any issues with nested virtualization?
I mean aside from performance? Nah, no issues. I don't run "production" work loads on my nested hypervisors but its just for shits and giggles.
Welcome! This is a surprisingly techy group, even if there's not always a lot of posts about homelabs and the like. But feel free to post and get the conversations started!
I'm still running ESXi at home. I've tried Proxmox on another server, and at some point, I'd like migrate to it for real for real (I'm just lazy), but I also wouldn't mind trying something like XCP-ng. Just to see what it's about. I've heard of it, but seemed like ESXi and Proxmox have more documentation and community-level support and experience.
What are some of the main benefits of running XCP-ng over Proxmox or even ESXi?
Wow, I was using ESXi professionally so long ago that I assumed it was dead and buried by this point. Is is still the "Enterprise" class of hypervisors that I remember it being? If so I am going to imagine a gloriously large homelab. Please, don't spoil this dream lol
We still use ESXi at work!
And uhh...yeah, gloriously large, sure. I do have a rack. So that must mean it is, right?
It's only a 12U...
I'll be posting plenty of "I broke everything and patched it back up - here's how to not do what I did" :)
I was pure ESXi for a long time, but VMware's enshittification pushed me to Proxmox, then Xen because I prefer its management style (and I like to make my life difficult for some reason). XCP-ng hosts are controlled by a totally independent "orchestra" VM, and ironically, I run that on Proxmox to prevent everything being broken when I break the XCP-ng cluster.
For one host, Proxmox is better and has more community support. ESXi is similar to Proxmox in terms of interacting with the host. XCP-ng, while you can interact with the host, you're really intended to control it through Xen Orchestra. I use it since you can have any number of hosts within the orchestra appliance and they all are controlled through the same management plane.
I’m considering coreos since more and more things run on docker, and I could make these that don’t also run on docker.