Hello everyone! During one of those illuminated evenings, I got the idea to move my small server in Scaleway to some more powerful server in Hetzner. If I will make the move, I am thinking of splitting the server in various VMs, to host different services that belongs to different trust boundaries, for example:

  • A Lemmy/writefreely instance
  • Vaultwarden/Gitea
  • Wireguard tunnel to my home infrastructure
  • Blogs, and other convenience services

In order to achieve the best level of separation, I was thinking of using VMs. My default choice would be Proxmox, because I used it in the past, and because I generally trust it, however I am trying to evaluate multiple options, and maybe someone has good or better experiences to share.

Other options I thought about are:

  • Run everything in Docker. I am going to do this nevertheless, but Docker escapes are always possible, especially with public facing images that I did not write myself and/or that require a host volume.
  • KVM directly? I am OK even without a GUI to be honest. I am not aware if there is some ansible module or even better Terraform provider for this, it would be great. (EDIT: I found https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dmacvicar/libvirt/0.7.1 which seems awesome!)
  • ESxi? I have no experience with this solution.

Any idea or recommendation?

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, probably this is the way I will go, to be honest. I just wanted to bounce some ideas in case I was missing out on some other technology, and a few people mentioned some stacks in this threat which are pretty obscure to me, so nice to look into them and compare!

  • Mautobu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you’re breaking into the industry, I’d say esxi. If it’s a hobby, then proxmox since you’re already familiar.

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Do you use just plain bash to script it? I saw that there is a Terraform provider and that looks actually interesting to me basically similar functionality to proxmox, but less software.

      • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Not parent commenter, but I use ansible + plain bash scripts/virsh/XML definitions to manage my libvirt instances/“cluster”, it just works.

        I have been running Proxmox on the side/at work, I like it as well but never took the time to dive in the API/automation side of things. libvirt is simpler but still powerful.

        • sudneo@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          Oh right, there is the XML aspect that I didn’t consider.

          I have to say that I very much have a preference for the declarative terraform strategy vs ansible, and I saw that the libvirt terraform provider is quite mature. I have seen that there are even some providers for proxmox (but less mature in my opinion), so it seems that either way the machine definition could be codified and automated. But the thing is, if the machines are all in Terraform code, basically there is no much use of proxmox (metrics are going to be in node exporter, maybe just backups and snapshots?).

          • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Ansible can be declarative if you do it right, and take the time to write a few roles to manage your use case. For example my ansible libvirt config looks like this:

            libvirt_vms:
              - name: front.example.org
                xml_file: '{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/front.example.org.xml'
                autostart: no
              - name: home.example.org
                xml_file: "{{ playbook_dir }}/data/libvirt/home.example.org.xml"
                state: running
            
            libvirt_port_forwards:
              - vm_name: front.example.org
                vm_ip: 10.10.10.225
                vm_bridge: virbr1
                dnat:
                  - host_interface: eth0
                    host_port: 22225 # SSH
                    vm_port: 22
                  - host_interface: eth0
                    host_port: 19225 # netdata
                    vm_port: 19999
            
            libvirt_networks:
              - name: home
                mac_address: "52:52:10:ae:0c:cd"
                forward_dev: "eth0"
                bridge_name: "virbr1"
                ip_address: "10.10.10.1"
                netmask: "255.255.255.0"
                autostart: yes
                state: active
            

            This is the only config I ever touch since the role handles changing configuration, running/stopping VMs, networks, etc. transparently. For initial provisioning I have a shell script that wraps around virsh/virt-install/virt-sysprep to setup a new VM in ~1 minute (It uses a preseed file, which is similar to what cloud-init offers). This part could be better integrated with ansible. Terraform has other advanced features such as managing hosts on cloud providers, but I don’t need those at the moment. If I ever do, I think I would still use ansible to run terraform deployments [1]

            Edit: the libvirt role if you’re curious

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Personally, after looking at what the industry wants; I would start my homelab trying to automate it with Ansible/Terraform. libvirt should be decent, and if you want to go over to BSD, I think ansible supports bhyve? If not, libvirt definitely runs on BSD so you could just automate that

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I work in security, so there is no really devops/sysadmin prospect for me. That said, I use ansible and (mostly) terraform professionally and for my lab, so that’s a good idea nevertheless. I don’t have much BSD experience, what do you think are the key reasons to go that route instead of Linux?

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        For me, it’s a personal decision. I find BSD more cohesive. That is subjective and has been debated for a decade now. I also find bhyve a bit easier to use, albiet the features are newer and more in number in KVM (for example: bhyve until very recently didn’t have VirtIO drivers, so Windows machines would be useless on it).

        I’m interested in working in Security myself. Would you be able to tell me a little more about your work? Also, what role/path in security would you recommend for a Cloud admin/System Admin?

  • nothingbutlove@lemmyonline.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    In the places where I’ve had to make similar decisions, I’ve used the need for ‘advanced’ features to make the call. If I’m looking for storage or networking redundancy, or I’ve been interested in running multiple hosts systems, or I’ve been looking to play with overlay networks, then I’ll grab Ovirt, Proxmox, VSphere, or Openstack (depending). When I just want something simple-ish, I just KVM / Podman on a Linux machine.

    • sudneo@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Good point, I don’t have any advanced use case, except maybe some slightly more complex network setup. Probably this is achievable with KVM too (and/or some firewall-fu). I would like to have fully IaC, so I don’t have to click through guis, so the availability of Terraform providers might be a dealbreaker (which I didn’t look yet for Proxmox, for example).

  • old_mike@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    LXD. Light and really easy to create and manage LXCs and VMs. The network management is amazing… Just try it