Hello everyone,
I finally managed to get my hands on a Beelink EQ 14 to upgrade from the RPi running DietPi that I have been using for many years to host my services.
I have always was interested in using Proxmox and today is the day. Only problem is I am not sure where to start. For example, do you guys spin up a VM for every service you intend to run? Do you set it up as ext4, btrfs, or zfs? Do you attach external HDD/SSD to expand your storage (beyond the 2 PCIe slots in the Beelink in this example).
I’ve only started reading up on Proxmox just today so I am by no means knowledgeable on the topic
I hope to hear how you guys setup yours and how you use it in terms of hosting all your services (nextcloud, vaultwarden, cgit, pihole, unbound, etc…) and your ”Dos and Don’ts“
Thank you 😊
I prefer running true vms too, but it is resource intensive.
Playing with lxcs and docker could allow one to run more services on a little beelink.
Yeah, with something that size you’re pretty much limited to containers.
Edit: Which is totally fine, OP. Self hosting is an opportunity to learn and your setup can be easily changed as your needs change over time.
Am I looking at the wrong device? Beelink EQ15 looks like it has an N150 and looks like 16GB of ram? That’s plenty for quite few VMs. I run an N100 minipc with only 8GB of RAM and about half a dozen VMs and a similar number of LXC containers. As long as you’re careful about only provisioning what each VM actually needs, it can be plenty.
In this situation it’s not necessarily that it’s the “right” or “wrong” device. The better question is, “does it meet your needs?” There are pros and cons to running each service in its own VM. One of the cons is the overhead consumed by the VM OS. Sometimes that’s a necessary sacrifice.
Some of the advantages of running a system like Proxmox are that it’s easily scalable and you’re not locked into specific hardware. If your current Beelink doesn’t prove to be enough, you can just add another one to the cluster or add a different host and Proxmox doesn’t care what it is.
TLDR: it’s adequate until it’s not. When it’s not, it’s an easy fix.
Absolutely. I actually have an upgrade already planned, but it’s just that it’s not because I can’t run VMs, it’s more that I want to run more hungry services than will fit on those resources, whatever virtualisation layers were being used. The fact that it’s an easy fix to more a VM/lxc to a new host is absolutely it, though.