this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Selfhosted

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VMs or containers? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by rpn@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I'm thinking about starting a self hosting setup, and my first thought was to install k8s (k3s probably) and containerise everything.

But I see most people on here seem to recommend virtualizing everything with proxmox.

What are the benefits of using VMs/proxmox over containers/k8s?

Or really I'm more interested in the reverse, are there reasons not to just run everything with k8s as the base layer? Since it's more relevant to my actual job, I'd lean towards ramping up on k8s unless there's a compelling reason not to.

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[–] donalonzo@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

VMs are often imperative and can be quite easy and familiar to setup for most people, but can be harder or more time-consuming to reproduce, depending on the type of update or error to be fixed. They have their own kernel and can have window managers and graphical interfaces, and can therefore also be a bit resource heavy.

Containers are declarative and are quite easy to reproduce, but can be harder to setup, as you'll have to work by trial-and-error from the CLI. They also run on your computers kernel and can be extremely slimmed down.

They are both powerful, depends how you want to maintain and interface with them, how resource efficient you want them to be, and how much you're willing to learn if necessary.

[–] Spiritreader@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

That sums it up really well.

I generally tend to try to use containers for everything and only branch out to VMs if it doesn't work or I need more separation.

This is my general recommendation as containers are easier to set up and in my opinion individual software packages are easier to maintain with things like compose. I have limited time for my self hosted instance and that took away a lot of work, especially when updating.

[–] Spiritreader@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

That sums it up really well.

I generally tend to try to use containers for everything and only branch out to VMs if it doesn't work or I need more separation.

This is my general recommendation as containers are easier to set up and in my opinion individual software packages are easier to maintain with things like compose. I have limited time for my self hosted instance and that took away a lot of work, especially when updating.