Re: Choosing a Virtualization Solution

[Yuchen Pei]

Hello again too,
On Mon, Dec 06 2021, opalvaults (ry) via emacsconf-org wrote:

> Hello (again :D)
>
> Last in this slew of e-mails is the decision of choosing a 
> hypervisor/virtualization
> solution.
> There are at least 4 options I can think of:
>
> Proxmox - AGPL - https://www.proxmox.com/en/ - Tends to be the go-to for a
> lot of small enterprise/homelabs. It's the shiniest free software 
> virtualization
> environment on the block! It comes with interfaces for scheduled backups,
> clustering, ease of LXC containers and VM's out of the box, ease of 
> networking,
> etc. It's kind of the whole one-stop-shop solution. However, big caveat: lots 
> of
> javascript, and lots of abstraction. It's an amazing piece of free software, 
> but
> for those reasons alone I  think we should at the very least consider
> alternatives.

With proxmox, is it possible perform some daily tasks (e.g. defining /
starting / stopping / removing a machine) without using a webclient?

>
> Cockpit - LGPL - https://cockpit-project.org/ - . It's just a web interface 
> for your
> server and has many plugins and extensions such as podman and libvirt.
> Essentially you install libvirt and it "unlocks" that module once you've 
> activated
> it. Very lightweight, integrates with a lot of technologies and solid as heck.
> Also, along with other technologies like Autofs, it only is activated when
> someone is actually using it, making it more light on resources. Like all of 
> these
> solutions, it's an abstraction layer so you don't learn the CLI interface for
> libvirt. However you don't have to use Cockpit if you don't want to. It's 
> simply
> broadcasting a web interface so if you felt inclined to never look at Cockpit 
> and
> only use CLI libvirt/whatever you're more than welcome to. Could be a good
> solution for both sides of the aisle?
>
> Ganeti - 2 Clause BSD - https://docs.ganeti.org/# - Another minimal  solution!
> It's essentially a wrapper around existing hypervisors. It was created by
> Google, and is still used for some of their internal infra, but it is 
> community
> supported. I believe it is also used by the Linux Foundation. This is what the
> company I work for uses, and I use a modest amount, so I can attest to it's 
> more
> simple approach vs. what proxmox offers. Allows for much of the same
> functionality as Proxmox has minus some of the shiny stuff. Something to
> consider, definitely still a solid option.
>
> libvirt - https://libvirt.org/ -  We could just use libvirt bare. Not sure 
> what else
> to say here. It'd be about as flexible as you want it to be. Don't let the 
> brevity
> of my comment put you off. I've just never used its raw API before so I have 
> less
> to say about this one. Still a solid choice but probably not for those new to 
> this
> kind of thing?

I'd vote for libvirt, it is the best vmm I've used so far by the merit
of being the only one ;) I like how you can do everything in the command
line and define machines in xml, making it very reproducible.

>
> I personally have an instance of Cockpit, and have a Proxmox instance as well.
> So during our next meeting, or during the Ansible meetup let's take a tour of
> those two at least so we can all see what that looks like in action if you 
> don't
> spin it up for yourself beforehand.
>
> Hopefully that gives a good overview of the options! I've provided links so 
> you
> can draw you own conclusions. Please feel free to discuss away! Another sorta
> urgent one along with the backups so we can get this show on the road
> :D.

Thanks for the overview.  By the way, I'd guess all the webclients
probably suffer from non-compliance of LibreJS, even though they are
probably free.  It would not be so bad if the webclients can run with
LibreJS blocking the unlabelled scripts (but in my experience most "web
apps" do not achieve this), and even better if there are
alternative clients to do things.

>

Best,
Yuchen

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