Proxmox vs. Debian: Running media server on older hardware

[Guest]

Thanks everyone, I feel much better about moving forward. I'm leaning towards Proxmox at this point because I could still run Windows as a VM while playing around and setting up a new drive pool. I'd like a setup that I can gradually upgrade because I don't often have a full day to dedicate to these matters.

MergerFS still seems like a good fit for my media pool, simply only to solve an issue where one media type is filling a whole drive as another sits at 50% capacity. I've lost this data before and it was easy to recover by way of my preferred backup method (private torrent tracker with paid freeleech). A parity drive with SnapRaid might be a nice stop gap. I don't think I feel confident enough with ZFS to potentially sacrifice uptime.

My dockers and server databases, however, are on a separate SSD that could benefit from ZFS. These files are backed up regularly so I can recover easily and I'd like as many failsafes as possible to protect myself. Having my Radarr database was indispensable when I lost a media drive a few weeks ago.

[jlh@lemmy.jlh.name]

You're not using a reverse proxy on rhel, so you'll need to also make sure that the ports you want are available, and set up a dns record for it, and set up certbot.

On k8s, I believe istio gateways are meant to be reused across services. You're using a reverse proxy so the ports will already be open, so no need to use firewall-cmd. What would be wrong with the Service included in the elasticsearch chart?

It's also worth looking at the day 2 implications.

For backups you're looking at bespoke cronjobs to either rsync your database or clone your entire 100gb disk image, compared to either using velero or backing up your underlying storage.

For updates, you need to run system updates manually on rhel, likely requiring a full reboot of the node, while in kubernetes, renovate can handle rolling updates in the background with minimal downtime. Not to mention the process required to find a new repo when rhel 11 comes out.

[marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

I am using a reverse proxy in production. I just didn't mention it here.

I'd have to set up a DNS record for both. I'd also have to create and rotate certs for both.

We use LVM, I simply mounted a volume for /usr/share/elasticsearch. The VMWare team will handle the underlying storage.

I agree with manually dealing with the repo. I dont think I'd set up unattended upgrades for my k8s cluster either so that's moot. Downtime is not a big deal: this is not external and I've got 5 nodes. I guess if I didn't use Ansible it would be a bit more legwork but that's about it.

Overall I think we missed each other here.

[jlh@lemmy.jlh.name]

Well, my point was to explain how Kubernetes simplifies devops to the point of being simpler than most proxmox or Ansible setups. That's especially true if you have a platform/operations team managing the cluster for you.

Some more details missed here would be that external-dns and cert-manager operators usually handle the DNS records and certs for you in k8s, you just have to specify the hostname in the HTTPRoute/VirtualService and in the Certificate. For storage, ansible probably simplifies some of this away, but LVM is likely more manual to set up and manage than pointing a PVC at a storageclass and saying "100Gi".

Either way, I appreciate the discussion, it's always good to compare notes on production setups. No hard feelings even in the case that we disagree on things. I'm a Red Hat Openshift consultant myself these days, working on my RHCE, so maybe we'll cross paths some day in a Red Hat environment!

[marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Considering I am the operations team, just goes to show how much I have left to learn. I didn't know about the external-dns operator.

Unfortunately, my company is a bit strange with certs and won't let me handle them myself. Something to check out at home I guess.

I agree with you about the LVM. I have been meaning to set up Rook forever but never got around to it. It might still take a while but thanks for the reminder.

Wow. That must have been some work. I don't have these certs myself but I'm looking at the CKA and CKS (or whatever that's called). For sure, I loved our discussion. Thanks for your help.

[Guest]

Awww man. I hope you didn't think I was questioning you. I was just curious and I never knew that or would have guessed. I learned something. Thanks.

[nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org]

It's also, I find, much more widely supported on a wider variety of hardware and with easier config automation.

[jimmy90@lemmy.world]

use nixos! you won't regret it

[noli@lemm.ee]

My needs are pretty similar to yours and I've recently moved back to using hypervisors after running everything from Debian to Arch to NixOS bare-metal over the last decade or so. It's so easy to bring-up/tear-down environments, which is great for testing things and pretty much the whole point of a homelab. I've got a few VMs + one LXC running on Proxmox with some headroom on a 6th gen i7, you should be fine resource wise tbh. Worth mentioning that you'll most likely need to passthrough your drives to the guest VM which is not supported via the webUI, but the config is documented on their wiki.

Overall, I'm happy with this setup and loving CoreOS as a base-OS for VMs and rootless podman containers for applications.

[tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden]

Don't worry, I didn't

[jlh@lemmy.jlh.name]

Yeah, I think you pick up things from all over the place as a consultant. I see lots of different environments and learn from them.

Ah yeah, external-dns operator is great! it's maybe a bit basic at times but its super convenient to just have A/AAAA records appear for all your loadbalancer svcs and HTTPRoutes. Saves a ton of time.

That's super unfortunate that the certs are siloed off. Maybe they can give you a NS record for a subdomain for you to use ACME on? I've seen that at some customers. Super important that all engineers have access to self-service certs, imo.

Rook is great! It definitely can be quite picky about hardware and balancing, as I've learned from trying to set it up with two nodes at home with spare hdds and ssds Very automated once it's all set up and you understand its needs, though. NFS provisioner is also a good option for a storageclass as a first step, that's what I used in my homelab from 2021 to 2023.

Heres my rook config:
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/external_applications/rook-ceph-helm.yaml
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications/rook-ceph

Up to 3 nodes and 120TiB now and I'm about to add 4 more nodes. I probably would recommend just automatically adding disks instead of manually adding them, I'm just a bit more cautious and manual with my homelab "pets".

I'm not very far on my RHCE yet tbh Red hat courses are a bit hard to follow But hopefully will make some progress before the summer.

The CKA and CKS certs are great! Some really good courses for those on udemy and acloudguru, there's a good lab environment on killer.sh, and the practice exams are super useful. I definitely recommend those certs, you learn a lot and it's a good way to demonstrate your expertise.

[appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Not to mention: Snapshots.