Migrating to a New Hypervisor!

Hi All,
In this video, I talk about my abrupt transition to the Proxmox VE (KVM) hypervisor. Stay tuned for more content!

[@shmitty1348]

I've been working in IT for about 20 years. I started out in desktop and moved to systems admin to virtualization engineer. I have been mentored by a some of the best engineers and architects, some of which have been working IT since the 80's and 90's. The people who have helped me progress my career the most, were the ones that told me: The most important skill you can have in IT isn't a specific software or programming language or hardware or tool. "The number one skill that you can have is adaptability." Solutions come and go and admins become fossils trying to manage dinosaur solutions if they don't evolve with the times. We need more videos like this, showcasing that if a solution doesn't work for the needs of the environment, switch the solution. There are a lot of admins in the industry that will spend company budget trying to make a solution work, that ultimately wastes time and money. This was a really good video with a lot of really good lessons from the home lab to enterprise.

[@johnstech7]

Hi there, I love this comment! Thanks for your words of wisdom! I’ve been trying out different technologies so I don’t become stagnant in my career. I’ve definitely felt some of what you said about companies sticking with a solution that just ends up wasting resources. I really appreciate you! 🙏🏾

[@ethaniel86]

well said. totally agree. i’m a 15yrs sys engineer/devops

[@spanport]

I was looking at migrating to XCP-NG from Proxmox pretty heavily recently but ultimately decided to stay on Proxmox. I respect what the guys are doing on the XCP-NG/Xen Orchestra project. Both have their quirks and pros and cons. I like the backup solution slightly better on XOA but PBS is coming along pretty nicely. One pitfall I found on XCP-NG was performance issues when using an AMD Epyc CPU which is acknowledge by the team and they're digging in with AMD on it. No fault to them at all! I might look at it again sometime soon. Building from sources is kind of odd but there are other options like docker to run XOA instead of a VM on the host. At the end of it pick what is best for you. Interested to see future videos on Proxmox! Keep it up :).

[@johnstech7]

Hi Tristan! Thanks for your feedback on the video! I really appreciate it! I think XCP has a slightly older kernel compared to the modified proxmox version so I assume it would tie back to that. Don’t quote me on that though! You have a good point on using Docker for XOA. I’ll look into that instead of cloning my VM from XCP. Thanks!

[@BACKSPIN9ball]

I had built up a nice proxmox lab but then the primary Node Nic seems to have stopped working somehow and my lab seems to be gone since I can't really access the second Node without the primary running for some reason. I have just slightly above basic Linux understanding and don't want to spend hours figuring out how to fix this and I have decided to rebuild the lab from scratch with newer hardware.

[@johnstech7]

Ahhh I feel that pain. I’m so sorry to hear that but I hope the rebuild works better for you!

[@liora2k]

I will start and say that I think you don’t know how to use XCP-NG and most of the things you mentioned at the beginning means that you couldn’t make it work. I understand why you switch to Proxmox and you he advantage it comes with but , it doesn’t mean XCP doesn’t have proper backups natively or compile things that you mentioned- good luck in your journey and do your homework. I personally worked many years with Proxmox and switched to XCP because of the enterprise capabilities it came with

[@johnstech7]

Hi, thanks for watching the video! I know XCP is able to do backups and passthrough hardware! I just don’t want to manually compile Xen Orchestra while Proxmox has all of those features built in without a subscription. Also, I am running on some consumer micro PCs and those just don’t work that well for passing through USB ports in Xen..so that was another factor. I would frequently have to spin a VM for the deprecated XenCenter Windows client to run certain tasks just not available on XO just yet. I’m also running mostly Linux guests so I figured I may as well go with KVM. In an enterprise environment, I’d prefer XCP over Proxmox (if Nutanix KVM/AHV isn’t in the question) since I’d most likely be working with Windows guests (still not sure about how ready windows virtio drivers are) and less “sideways” tinkering required in the command line.

[@druxpack8531]

@@johnstech7 the XO from source script is dead simple...it literally takes 60 seconds to update...can even set it up as a cron job.

[@johnstech7]

That still doesn't fix the other points I have. I'm not bashing XCP, Proxmox just works better for my use case.

[@liora2k]

@@druxpack8531 it’s working for me like a charm and onetime when a feature didn’t work for me, the Xoa team contacted me me upon a bug I opened and it was fixed on the following day ! And they followed it up to confirm it been resolved

[@MarkConstable]

Thanks for the noisy reminder of why I only use minipcs in my homelab... and yes, Proxmox Backup Server FTW!

[@johnstech7]

Haha of course! Thanks for supporting the channel!! 🤝🏾

[@sohail579]

in Proxmox what makes you decide to use a LXC over a VM and vice versa?

[@johnstech7]

Hi, thanks for supporting the channel! I run LXCs for any service that sits directly on top of the system without another containerization system like Docker. From what I hear it’s possible to run docker on LXC but for stability reasons I’d rather run those as a VM since they would qualify as nested containers. VMs are for everything else!

[@sohail579]

@@johnstech7 awesome thanks for the explanation

[@johnstech7]

Of course!