In the next ~6 months I’m going to entirely overhaul my setup. Today I have a NUC6i3 running Home Assistant OS, and a NUC8i7 running OpenMediaVault with all the usual suspects via Docker.
I want to upgrade hardware significantly, partially because I’d like to bring in some local LLM. Nothing crazy, 1-8B models hitting 50tps would make me happy. But even that is going to mean a beefy machine compared to today, which will be nice for everything else too of course.
I’m still all over the place on hardware, part of what I’m trying to decide is whether to go with a single machine for everything or keep them separate.
Idea 1 is a beefy machine and Proxmox with HA in a VM, OMV or TrueNAS in another, and maybe a 3rd straight Debian to separate all the Docker stuff. But I don’t know if I want to add the complexity.
Idea 2 would be beefy machine for straight OMV/TrueNAS and run most stuff there, and then just move HA over to the existing i7 for more breathing room (mostly for Frigate, which could also separate to other machine I guess).
I hear a lot of great things about Proxmox, but I’m not sold that it’s worth the new complexity for me. And keeping HA (which is “critical” compared to everything else) separated feels like a smart choice. But keeping it on aging hardware diminishes that anyway, so I don’t know.
Just wanting to hear various opinions I guess.
Proxmox adds a lot of complexity and a nice GUI. If you are fine with using the terminal, there is really not much benefit from Proxmox and the potential issues from the added complexity are IMHO not worth it. I am not a Proxmox expert though, so take this advise with a grain of salt 😅
Is it decently easy to create and manage vm’s and containers with the terminal? I use proxmox at the moment. Should I switch to Ubuntu server?
Thats a hard no IMO.
Even if you want to do something other than proxmox (just use Debian, fedora, or opensuse).
Its not bad from the CLI, you just need to know your commands.
Will get you 1 vcpu, 1GB ram, and an 8GB drive worth of debian. If you don’t specify a path, in home under .local/share/libvirt/images it will go!
You can also then
And you’ll get the XML, where you can edit away.
Personally, I’d rather use the webgui for most things, but yeah its perfectly doable from the CLI.
I would have thought debian is better than ubuntu but I couldn’t find a server version of debian. Where do I find debian server or debian cli only?
Debian is by default suited for server. Just skip the desktop environment part in the installer.
Oh ok, I’ve never installed debian before so thats good to know.
With libvirt it is fairly easy yes. And you can also install a standalone web-gui like Cockpit or use the desktop app virt-manager over ssh to do it.