this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Great news! I started my selfhost journey over a year ago, and I'm finding myself needing better hardware. There's so many services I want that my NAS can't handle. And I unfortunately need to add GPU transcoding to my Jellyfin setup.

What's the best OS for a machine focused on containers and (getting started with) VMs? I've heard Proxmox

What CPU specs should I be concerned about?

I'm willing to buy a pre-built as long as its hardware has sufficient longevity.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 11 points 1 day ago (9 children)

I think at this point I agree with the other commenter. If you're strapped for storage it's time to leave Synology behind, but it sounds more like it's time to separate your app server from your storage server.

I use proxmox, and it was my primary when I got started with the same thing. I recommend build out storage in proxmox directly, that will be for VM images and container volumes. Then utilize regular backups to your Synology box. That way you have hot storage for drives and running things, cold storage for backups.

Then, inside your vms and containers you can mount things like media and other items from your Synology.

For you, I would recommend proxmox, then on top of that a big VM for running docker containers. In that VM you have all of your mounts from Synology into that VM, like Jellyfin stuff, and you pass those mounts into docker.

If you ever find yourself needing to stretch beyond the one box, then you can think about kubernetes or something, but I think that would be a good jump for now.

[–] Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Why not use Proxmox to host the containers directly instead of using a VM? I know it's easier to use this way but it kinda misses the point of using proxmox then

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Not at all. Proxmox does a great job at hosting VMs and giving a control plane for them - but it does not do containers well. LXCs are a thing, and it hosts those - but never try to do docker in an LXC. (I tried so many different ways and guides and there were just too many caveats, and you end up always essentially giving root access to your containers, so it's not great anyway). I'd like to see proxmox offer some sort of docker-first approach will it will manage volumes at the proxmox level, but they don't seem concerned with that, and honestly if you're doing that then you're nearing kubernetes anyway.

Which is what I ended up doing - k3s on proxmox VMs. Proxmox handles the instances themselves, spins up a VM on each host to run k3s, and then I run k3s from within there. Same paradigm as the major cloud providers. GKE, AKS, and EKS all run k8s within a VM on their existing compute stack, so this fits right in.

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing your experience ! I was kinda interested for my new N300 if I should install promox+LXC-docker or promox+VM-docker !

Hearing you had a lot of issues and caveats makes my choice easier wihout even giving it a try ! So thanks !

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 21 hours ago

I really wanted it to work, for me it made the most sense I thought, as little virtualization as I could do. VM felt like such a heavy layer in between - but it just wasn't meant to work that way. You have to essentially run your LXC as root, meaning that it's essentially just the host anyway so it can run docker. Then when you get down to it, you've lost all the benefits of the LXC vs just running docker. Not to mention that anytime there was even am minor update to proxmox something usually broke.

I'm surprised Proxmox hasn't added straight-up support for containers, either by docker, podman, or even just containerd directly. But, we aren't it's target audience either.

I'm glad you can take my years of struggling to find a way to get it to work well and learn from it.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

Docker runs fine nested in lxc with uid/gid mapping.

The difficulties of running docker in lxc are particular to proxmox, I ran docker in lxc on proxmox for years, but I'm glad I moved incus; much more sensible approach.

[–] Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks for your point of view ! I'm still new to proxmox and I went the LXC route... Seems to be working well so far but time will tell!

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