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.
