just a general discussion because I’m unable to make up my mind. Moreover, I see that virtualization threads are quite old.
I have a microserver gen 10 plus, 1TB SSD as root disk and planning to buy 2x HDD for a RAID1 configuration.
This system has 4C/4T and 16GB of RAM.
My use case:
General purpose NAS with shares accessible from different computers on LAN
VM or containers with my test environments (e.g. web apps with web servers and databases, nothing heavy)
VM or containers (rockons in that case) with common services (e.g. unifi controller, torrent client, etc.)
I’m ok with both ESXi or managing direclty OpenSuse. Of course ESXi would be faster and easiest, but I’m concerned about performances (just 4C/4T and 16 GB of RAM) and I don’t “philosophically” like to have a virtualized NAS solution.
Welcome to the world of Rockstor @GoGoPenguin - and what a great topic for your first post
I was in this camp for many years until recently. At work we use VMs for nearly everything but I have never really considered it for home use. However this changed after a few posts I read about the topic got my curiosity going and started testing some ideas on my test server at home.
I think my main concern was performance, considering there is an added layer of OS between the NAS solution and the bare metal it is actually running on - it turned out my concerns were unfounded.
When going the virtualisation route I don’t have test VMs on a box running my main ‘production’ services - these are hosted on a separate physical test virtual host device, and anything that passes muster there can then be set up on the main production box. But that’s just me and my preferred way of doing things.
So, my current setup is as follows:
‘Production’ physical host running Proxmox, hosting 3 VMs: Rockstor, a Mediaserver (running Debian and hosting Logitech Media Server and Jellyfin) and a Utility Server (very light duty Debian hosting mainly backup scripts and some other bits and bobs).
‘Test’ physical host running Proxmox, with basically a mirror setup of the Production environment and some other test/experiment VMs which come and go as needed. This host is only switched on when I need it, and is powered down 90% of the time.
Based on my experiences with Proxmox I would be minded to give virtualisation a try to see how it works for you. I’ve never used ESXi in the home, but it is a popular solution in the commercial world.
My servers are not the highest spec around: prod is 4 core, test is an old dual core, and each has 8 GB RAM, and neither struggle to get the job done effectively.
Here another Proxmox user.
At work we are using Vmware. We only work with vm’s for almost all of our production servers.
That’s why I wanted to virtualize Rockstor here at home. I’m using Proxmox. Currently running version 7.2.3. And yes I could install it on bare metal (which I did with Rockstor3). But virtualization has got some advantages.
Rockstor4 is running fine on an older Intel core i3/2.9ghz with 8gb ddr3 RAM.
Proxmox is running on a Samsung ssd 860 evo2. All (NAS) data is runing on 2x 3tb WD30EFRX.
Performance is good for the things I’m doing with Rockstor4 (Plex, mariadb).
