Hi,
I am probably a little bit late to the party at this point, but here are my
thoughts.
As far as Linux accessibility goes I don’t have much experience when it comes
to containers, but I think just about any distribution would do as containers
are ran at the os level so it is up to the os the manage them unless you are
dealing with some third party cloud management engine.
For local based home lab use the main options are Kvm or Xen that are really
accessible.
Later versions of Vmware Esxi with management tools may be though.
Tom
From: Al Puzzuoli <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2023 12:22 PM
To: 'Jason White' <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: RE: What's the most Accessible Linux VM Server Platform?
Thanks,
I’ll start with KVM. I believe Proxmox is basically a web layer for KVM anyway
so best to gain at least some familiarity with KVM before ever touching Proxmox
I think.
I’m looking to run a mix of containers and virtual machines. I’ll likely end up
containerizing many services such as Pihole and plex, but I’m not sure it
makes sense to containerize other things, such as Windows domain controllers,
etc.
From: Jason White <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 9, 2023 11:43 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: What's the most Accessible Linux VM Server Platform?
On 9/7/23 10:31, Al Puzzuoli wrote:
I currently have a VMWare ESXI host machine in my home lab. I’m considering
alternative platforms and happy to experiment, but also don’t want to get part
way down a rabbit hole and then realize I’m suddenly dealing with a bunch of
hard to surmount accessibility issues.
Have you considered running KVM under Debian?
I’m also unsure about performing OS installs . is it possible to get audio over
a VNC connection or something?
If you run Qemu/KVM, you can have text console access to the guest operating
system. This worked when I last tried it, admittedly a number of years ago.
You could also run prebuilt images designed for use in a virtual machine
instead of starting with an ISO 9660 file and using an operating system
installer.
Much of the attention is shifting away from virtual machines these days and
toward Linux containers instead. I am assuming in my reply that you actually
want a virtual machine for some reason, but if what you really need is a
container, then there should be fewer accessibility issues and less resource
consumption. (The kernel is shared between the host operating system and the
containers, but the libraries and running programs aren't.)
For containers, you would be best advised to look at Podman, Docker, etc. I
haven't had experience with these tools, so I can't offer much by way of detail.
