Hi. Since yesterday i selfhosted all my stuff with a raspberry pi and two odroids. Everything works ok, but after i read about a few apps that are not supported by the arm-architecture of the SBCs and about the advantages of the backup-solution in proxmox, i bought a little server (6500T/8GB/250GB) to try proxmox.
Installed proxmox, but now - before i install my first VM - i have a few questions:
a) What Linux OS do i take? Ubuntu Server?
b) Should it be headless?
The server is in the cellar of my house, so would there be any advantages of installing an OS with a GUI?
Do you actually need a VM for your use case? You might use docker containers or LXC instead.
Normally I use VMs for situations where a container isn’t available (Windows, openwrt) or the VM is better supported (arguably
home assistant).This indeed. To OP: if you use LXC containers using templates that Proxmox provides, they are headless by default. A Gui is a waste of resources.
I realize I’m being pedantic, but aren’t docker containers essentially just wrapped VMs?
No, containers are basically sandboxed applications+dependencies running on top of the host’s kernel. VMs run their own separate kernel. If anything, a container is less “wrapped” than a VM.
Containers share the system’s resources with the OS; VMs take these resources for themselves.
Docker containers are more like LXCs—in fact, early versions of Docker used LXC under the hood, but the project diverged over time and support for LXC was eventually dropped as they switched to their own container runtime.
Nope. Docker containers are kind of “virtual filesystems” and programs are running on top of the host’s kernel. They’re just isolated processes running on their own volume - to which you can also attach external “volumes”.