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A New Arrival

Published Jun 7, 2016 by in Proxmox, Home Server, Lxc, Docker, Vmware Esxi at https://rmoff.net/2016/06/07/a-new-arrival/

After a long and painful delivery, I’m delighted to announce the arrival of a new addition to my household … :

This custom-build from Scan 3XS is sat in my study quietly humming away. I’m going to use it for hosting VMs for R&D on OBIEE, Big Data Lite, Elastic, InfluxDB, Kafka, etc. I’ll blog various installations that I’ve done on it as a reference for myself, and anyone else interested. Which I guess means, myself ;)

I’m running Proxmox 4 on it, which is a bare-metal hypervisor. The other option I looked at was VMWare ESXi but I went for Proxmox because:

  • As well as ‘fat’ VMs, it supports Linux Containers (LXC), which means I get a lot more bang for my buck in terms of capacity, as well as componentisation of different tools that I run on it
  • I’ve run Proxmox 3 on an old laptop for several years previously and found it to be a perfect fit
  • VMWare didn’t look like it supported containers, and looked like a potentially confusing/complex stack for a single node in a home environment, and heavy on the GUI tools
  • Whilst VMWare ESXi offers easier import/export of VMs (eg to VMWare Fusion on a laptop, or of OVAs such as Oracle’s SampleApp) it is relatively easy still to do on Proxmox

Earlier versions of Proxmox used OpenVZ containers and a custom kernel that I sometimes hit issues with not being compatible (e.g. with sysdig). Proxmox 4 uses the mainstream Linux Containers (LXC), and also supports Docker which is something I’ve yet to get to grips with but I think could be useful.


Robin Moffatt

Robin Moffatt works on the DevRel team at Confluent. He likes writing about himself in the third person, eating good breakfasts, and drinking good beer.

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