Proxmox VE (Virtually Serving the Home User)
I have been a long time user of VMWare and have used the product extensively to run Windows on Linux or vice-versa. In addition, I have used it to virtualize many of the services I use at home. For instance, my Samba and FTP server is a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.04 on an Ubuntu 12.04 host. This has saved my ass in the past when I’ve had hardware issues and had to migrate from one computer to another. Since the Samba and FTP server was a virtual machine I merely had to move it from the computer it was on and host it on a temporary computer while I repaired the hardware on the main computer. Once the hardware was repaired I simply moved the virtual machine back. I recently added Owncloud to my virtual server collection. This has been very effective and I have been very happy with the decision to virtualize the server since moving it will now be very easy and making backups is as simple as stopping the guest, making a copy of the file and then restarting it. The virtualized servers have been running on my fileserver which is mostly responsible for storing the 2 TB of data in a raid 1 configuration and making it available to the household users. This has all been working quite well, but in the words of Tim Allen, I wanted to give it “More power!!!!”. It was a simple enough decision to split the virtual server part off of the fileserver, let the fileserver continue to host its 2 TB of data and let a new computer do all the virtualization…. Enter Proxmox VE. Proxmox VE is similar to VMWare ESXi in that it is installed on bare metal and runs virtual machines that you have to remotely access. Proxmox supports fully virtualized KVM and OpenVZ or containers. This was ideal for me since most of my home based virtual machines run Linux and containers are known to be much more efficient than KVM, but can not run Windows. With the platform selected the next step was to purchase the hardware. I selected the AMD FX-8350 processor with its 8 cores feeling that this would be perfect for CPU hungry virtual machines. I snapped this into an MSI 990FXA-GD65 which would unleash its power giving it 6GB SATA III ports. I then added a Seagate Barracuda 1TB HD, but this failed after a week and I replaced it with a Western Digital Red 2TB for nearly twice the price. Last I put in two 4GB sticks to take advantage of the dual channel memory, but planned to upgrade later. As for video and case, these things are merely fluff on a headless PC, so any old one was fine. In the end it came to about $630, a little more than I wanted to spend, but a lot less than if I had purchased something prefab. Installing Proxmox was a breeze as everything is open … Continue Reading →