tl;dr: Proxmox or bare metal? Containers yes/no? What is your use case?
I used a Dell R710 when I first started self-hosting, it ran ESXi with one VM for each service I wanted. Restarting the server required me to first shutdown each VM in order and then the whole host. When setting up a new service to host I had to create a new VM (allocate RAM, disk etc), install the OS (I ran Debian) and then follow instructions for how to setup the service. This mostly was not a problem but one software I never managed to get working was Apache Guacamole.
Nowadays I have a Dell Optiplex I salvaged for parts, got a new case and all my HDDs from my R710. Because it has much less RAM and an old Intel i5 (6th or 7th generation), I decided to get into Docker. With Docker containers you write your compose file and it will just work. No more need to dig through documentation for which version of a dependency to use, how to handle if two services on the same host need different versions (this was part of the reason for one VM/service). With Docker, I can try out a software in seconds and have it configured to my liking in minutes.
Today I have NixOS (bare metal) and it comes with Podman which uses systemd. Hence restarting my OS (albeit not that often, almost never unless I mess up my config) is a no-brainer because Podman via systemd will manage everything. Adding, stopping or removing containers in general is easy. I have a script running as a service which will stop a container, create a BTRFS subvolume snapshot, start the service again and start borg backup to backup from the snapshot.
For me using Proxmox would just an extra layer of complexity I don’t need. I only have one server and I am the only user.
Questions:
- Do you use Proxmox instead of a bare metal installation?
- Do you use containers or do you install manually?
- What is you use case that requires your setup the way it is?
ProxmoxVE helper scripts have been around for quite a while and are pretty easy to read, as well as being pretty well supported in the community. You can just go to the GitHub page and read them. I’ve used some of their scripts before by downloading them, customizing the scripts to my needs, and hosting it on a local web server inside my network. Now I can run one command and I’ll have a new debian container on my host with ssh keys and everything.
While I agree with you that they’re well seasoned and established I disagree a lot with them being easy to read. They have a lot of sub-scripts that they include willy-nilly over multiple levels.
Another thing I dislike about them is basically the same as with docker, that they all include everything in it. Like every container wants his own mariadb/postgres/whatever. It should be at least an option to use existing containers, I don’t need to run 5 psql servers… (I know that it had advantages too having everything separate but ehh). And then switching the software back to using the existing psql is more work then just not using the scripts at all…