I have friends and relatives that would like to do some memory and compute intensive tasks, but lack the hardware locally. I have loads of ram doing nothing and a little compute to spare. Is there a way for me to set up some service accessible to them that would allow them to spin up VMs, similar to Linode or DigitalOcean? I know letting outside access to a proxmox server would be disastrous. I guess I could setup a VPN server into a virtualized proxmox server? Would rather find a way to point them to a url with a username and password and have them able to use my server as their vps like AWS or Linode.
This is opening a can of worms. Are you going to be their support person? What if one person destroys the environment and someone elses work?
Exactly, I can’t let two users into the same VM server as administrators, like you said, they could manipulate other user’s resources. The front end to online VPS sites kinda give each user a cordoned off sandbox of resources to play in. Maybe if I gave each their own virtualized proxmox instance they could VPN into?
You might want to try Openstack. It is set up for running a multi-tenant cloud.
Heard of this. Need to look into devstack. Thank you for putting it back on my radar
This is the way.
It can be done. It’s not worth the work involved. You could firewall off the two proxmox instances from each other and your own network. Then allow VPN access into the environment. You’ll have to allow the machines access to the Internet to get software updates. The moment you do that you’re opening the door to them making an outbound tunnel to make services publicly accessible. Then you’ve got every bot on the internet scanning your services for vulnerabilities/exploits.
Access to the outside world is where I start to not know what to do. If this was just locally run, I know how it would try and attack it, but the fact they they have to have access to the internet, that’s a hurdle I do not know how to get over.
I mean you could. Shell accounts did this back in the day but yes users could still abuse the system.