VMs or containers?

rpn@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 83 points –

I'm thinking about starting a self hosting setup, and my first thought was to install k8s (k3s probably) and containerise everything.

But I see most people on here seem to recommend virtualizing everything with proxmox.

What are the benefits of using VMs/proxmox over containers/k8s?

Or really I'm more interested in the reverse, are there reasons not to just run everything with k8s as the base layer? Since it's more relevant to my actual job, I'd lean towards ramping up on k8s unless there's a compelling reason not to.

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I, personally, haven't done a whole lot of VM work but I do run a metric ass-ton of containers. I can spool up servers in docker compose on absolutely dogshit hardware and have it run serviceably. Also, the immutability of the container OS is really nice for moving things around and/or getting them set up quickly.

Where did you learn so much about Docker? Having a server at home, I'm more inclined to spin up a VM. I would like to learn more about Docker.

If I'm honest, I've stumbled nose-first through pretty much everything I know. I am never afraid to break things as long as I learn from it.

Just get started somewhere. I ran traditional VMs for most things before and I would never go back unless it was necessary for something.

Easiest way is just to start using Docker for some service you're hosting that has a public image available and go from there. If you want a more visual approach there's stuff like Portainer you can use too.

Also get started early on with docker compose, it makes it much easier to organize your container configs.