alt Hacker NewsMigrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus
Comments
I'm also considering migrating from Proxmox to Incus, but I'd look into IncusOS rather than having to manage the host OS myself.
I've been using incus for a while now and actually run it on a side project in production for the better part of a year. Rock solid performance.
NixOS has transformed my use of Proxmox. I configure, build, and deploy everything from my nix workstation. I don't need to use the PVE gui at all. Proxmox is just a target, and I've abstracted things enough to where I can deploy the same machines to libvirt on a local machine too. Why would I need to let my agent into my PVE box? I haven't looked at incus, but if I wanted to run the full stack declaratively, nixos and LLMs are so powerful now that I would probably just say to run libvirt and ZFS on nixos natively.
Incus is great. I've been trying to revive an unmaintained ansible collection to manage incus resources https://github.com/sbstp/ansible-collection-incus
Another proxmox-esque project I've been watching is Sylve, a control plane for FreeBSD that provides a web interface to jails, bhyve VMs, and containers [1]. It's new-ish, but it looks like a possible sweet spot replacement for both proxmox and TrueNAS (which was originally also built on FreeBSD before they switched to Linux IIRC), at least for my homelab-ing use case. Potentially eventually for environments at greater scale also. The company behind it is a software consultancy and Sylve is built with their actual business needs in mind, and is BSD-licensed like the OS it runs atop.
One of the developers building Sylve gave a talk last year [2].
[1]: https://sylve.io/
> But fundamentally, Proxmox is built around clicking buttons. It is a GUI-first paradigm.
Uhh, whut? It provides a button-y interface, but you can do everything via config files and `pct` on the command line if you prefer. I know that’s not full nix-style declarative, but you don’t have to mislead to sell me on the advantages of declarative infra.
This seems very cool and I will probably try it, but I think I’m missing something. I run Proxmox so that I can have multiple VMs running on my NUC. This doesn’t really solve that right? I cant spin up a windows 11 vm one weekend for a random experiment.
I haven't abandoned Proxmox yet, but the take here resonates with me. I do not like configuring appliances. I prefer defining infra as code, having that diffable, assertable, etc. I have had pretty good luck managing Proxmox clusters with the Proxmox API (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html) or just letting the agent shell in as root (lol). I built a very simple provisioning tool called vmfactory that takes some really somple config on disk, bakes a fresh qcow image, pushes it to proxmox and then configures networking and boots it. It's extremely rudimentary but has been working well for me.
I did abandon TrueNAS, however. It really is a locked-down appliance. Good luck installing custom software on the base OS. I have a domain-joined Ubuntu/ZFS box that inherits a lot of policy from FreeIPA and/or Ansible config that is all backed by files on disk. It's been really easy to orchestrate what many would consider overkill in my homelab because literally everything is represented in a single Github repo.
I yanked vmfactory out and into a standalone repo if anyone is interested: https://github.com/whalesalad/vmfactory
[dead]
I get the advantage of fully declarative systems such as Nix, but everything you do in proxmox via GUI can be done via CLI: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/#_command_line_interface
CLI is first class in proxmox, I use the qm command for managing vms all the time. The networking is also just a file in `/etc/network/interfaces` that I modify with vim as needed.