Virtualization & Cloud

When we inherit a Proxmox cluster, backups are one of the first things I look at. Proxmox makes them easy to turn on, which also makes it easy to assume you're covered when you aren't. This is what we run for our own cluster and for clients: which vzdump mode we pick, how we schedule and prune, why I think Proxmox Backup Server is worth the extra box, and the restore testing that tells you whether any of it works. Have these ready A Proxmox VE node or clusterBackup storage that is not on the same disks or pool your VMs run on. An NFS share or a separate disk works, and a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is better.A spare VM ID range for restore tests. We use 9000 and up.A snap…

Over a few years we'd piled up a fleet of cloud VPS instances: a monitoring box, a ticketing box, a couple of web hosts, a mail relay, and a scattering of one-off servers. Each was cheap on its own, but together they cost us about $334 a month. We consolidated everything onto our own Proxmox cluster in a colocation rack, and the hosting bill dropped to about $112 a month. That's roughly two thirds less, and it keeps heading toward near zero as the last stragglers move. Honestly, the bigger win for us was having one place to back up, monitor and patch. Here's the method that let us do it without the people we support seeing any downtime. What we had in place first A Proxmo…

Someone wants to try a self-hosted tool, and of course it ships as a Docker image. A whole VM for it feels like overkill, so most of the time we run Docker inside an LXC container on Proxmox instead. Containers start in seconds, share the host kernel and use far less RAM. It works well once the right features are turned on. Here's how we set it up, how we give a container a TUN device so Tailscale or WireGuard can run inside it, and when I give up and build a VM. Before you start A Proxmox VE host. We're on the 8.x and 9.x series.A Debian or Ubuntu container template downloaded to local storageRoot shell access to the Proxmox hostStay unprivilegedIn an unprivileged contai…

When the support contract ran out on a 4-node Nutanix block, the easy move would have been to recycle it. I'm glad we didn't. Those chassis are close to ideal Proxmox VE and Ceph hardware: identical nodes, SSD and HDD in every sled, dual 10GbE, and IPMI on each one. Ours now runs a good chunk of our internal workload. This is the order we built it in, plus what I'd plan differently next time. Have these lined up first The block itself. We used four nodes, and three is the minimum for a sane Ceph cluster.IPMI access to each node for console and virtual mediaThe Proxmox VE ISO, on USB or mounted over IPMIA switch with VLAN support, ideally 10GbE for CephAn IP plan for each …