Proxmox
I built a budget gaming computer in December of 2020, but I wasn’t able to buy a decent graphics card at the time. I figured I could upgrade it later which of course never happened. Too expensive for the first couple years then started not making sense to me. After enough time it just made more sense to build a new gaming computer. After thinking about it for most of the year, I bit the bullet and ordered all the parts to build a new computer during black Friday / Cyber Monday deals.
I initially planned to do a hand me down deal where I’d replace the shop computer/server with the 2020 rig. But after thinking about it and running some calculations on electricity cost, I elected to build a dedicated hypervisor to run virtual machines on. No more Virtualbox VMs on the shop computer.
I decided I’d try Proxmox again since it seemed the most promising solution for what I wanted. Since the computer already had two 480gb SSD drives, I figured I’d run the VMs on those and add an extra 8TB HD I had to save backups on.
It took me a little while to wrap my head around how things worked in proxmox. The first thing is how the VMs are associated with numbers and the names are just human friendly aliases. Understanding storage concepts: LVM, LVM-Thin, Directory, and ZFS definitely required some trial and error on my part.
Initially I setup a couple test VMs and experimented with snapshots, backups, and disaster recovery. After about a week I was convinced it was a stable platform I could trust, so I began the somewhat agonizing process of moving the Virtualbox VMs from the shop computer into Proxmox. To do this I had to first export them to vmdk files and then import the vmdk files.
Next up was scheduling backup jobs. This is super easy to do. Much better than batch files and scheduled tasks on the shop computer! I just setup a weekly job to do a full backup of the VMs I want backed up with a retention policy of the last 4.
Proxmox has an excellent CLI utility which made automating snapshots with Ansible…a snap!
I’m really pleased with Proxmox. In fact, I even prefer it over full blown VMWare vSphere where I have some other VMs running.
