Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Good lord, if how they were managing Proxmox with an agent was essentially using Playwright, no wonder they thought there was a problem.
I don't even do that, I go into a shell and run qm commands for more complicated things. And for anything I ask an agent to do, it goes straight to qm and other CLI tools as well.
Weird.
by ikidd - It's really hard to tell what the benefits of Incus over Ganeti are. The Incus site doesn't really lead with features or benefits that I can see. About the only things I could figure out are that Incus can manage containers and can manage instance creation through cloning a base volume, where ganeti (afaik) always creates volume and populates it. Well, and Incus seems to be MUCH more popular than Ganeti.
I searched the documentation but it wasn't really clear what its live migration and ZFS migration story is, but when I asked Claude to research it, it tells me that it supports live migration via ZFS snapshot replication, which is exactly what I'm looking for. I implemented a ganeti storage driver that does the same thing and am just getting ready to start testing it, but if Incus supports it I might look at moving that direction.
Anyone use Incus live migration with ZFS?
by linsomniac - > But fundamentally, Proxmox is built around clicking buttons. It is a GUI-first paradigm.
Uhh, whut? It provides a button-y interface, but you can do everything via config files and `pct` on the command line if you prefer. I know that’s not full nix-style declarative, but you don’t have to mislead to sell me on the advantages of declarative infra.
by kennywinker - As people have said proxmox supports cli and api usage as well but a huge part of learning it is just poking the various settings and fiddling with the different options. I never felt the need to go beyond that to automate settings. I don't even cluster distinct proxmox hosts.
Also the mentions and requirements relating AI in the article sound like they are from another world. Did things really come to this? Even if they had, you one can still snapshot proxmox vms as well as host (zfs).
by dizhn - I'm also considering migrating from Proxmox to Incus, but I'd look into IncusOS rather than having to manage the host OS myself.by cassianoleal
- I haven't abandoned Proxmox yet, but the take here resonates with me. I do not like configuring appliances. I prefer defining infra as code, having that diffable, assertable, etc. I have had pretty good luck managing Proxmox clusters with the Proxmox API (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html) or just letting the agent shell in as root (lol). I built a very simple provisioning tool called vmfactory that takes some really somple config on disk, bakes a fresh qcow image, pushes it to proxmox and then configures networking and boots it. It's extremely rudimentary but has been working well for me.
I did abandon TrueNAS, however. It really is a locked-down appliance. Good luck installing custom software on the base OS. I have a domain-joined Ubuntu/ZFS box that inherits a lot of policy from FreeIPA and/or Ansible config that is all backed by files on disk. It's been really easy to orchestrate what many would consider overkill in my homelab because literally everything is represented in a single Github repo.
I yanked vmfactory out and into a standalone repo if anyone is interested: https://github.com/whalesalad/vmfactory
by whalesalad - I get the advantage of fully declarative systems such as Nix, but everything you do in proxmox via GUI can be done via CLI: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/#_command_line_interface
CLI is first class in proxmox, I use the qm command for managing vms all the time. The networking is also just a file in `/etc/network/interfaces` that I modify with vim as needed.
by redlewel - I've recently migrated to Incus and am enjoying it so far. Hopefully the good feelings last.
Roughly ten years ago, my homelab consisted of a dozen virtual machines running on SmartOS. I was not familiar with Illumos, and this was before it had a widely available web UI, but it was simple enough to use that these challenges didn't matter much. SmartOS was designed to boot reliably from USB flash storage, allowed me to use all my SATA ports for VM storage, and was my first "immutable" operating system. The primary focus on ZFS storage was another great quality of SmartOS.
Two moves and several years later, it was time to rebuild the lab, and I decided to go with Proxmox because it had decent ZFS support. Experience with Proxmox has been very good too. The GUI, many more virtualization features (in addition to the key ones I care about), and better hardware support through the Linux kernel have kept me on Proxmox for a long time.
Customizing my Proxmox installation always gave me anxiety. How could I defend my hypervisor from configuration drift? I wished there could be an immutable version of Proxmox.
Later on, I learned about govulcheck, which offers a novel dynamic/static analysis hybrid approach to vulnerability management. Nothing else out there does this (without teaming up with some huge company). I began to think that I should favor software solutions based on golang.
Ultimately, Incus (and IncusOS) fit this need very well. My IncusOS hosts excellent and I'm glad I can run Incus itself on most Linux distros - including NixOS!
I'll keep a small Proxmox host around for experimenting with new kernel features (Intel GVT-g / SR-IOV graphics) and old operating systems like Windows XP or anything else that needs special QEMU options.
by evanjrowley